McCain and Iowa

A week or so ago, I made the case that anyone not named Gephardt or Dean really had no business trying to compete in the Iowa caucuses. I thought Clark and Lieberman had made the right choice, just as Senator McCain had in 2000.

(Late addition: David Broder this morning seems to agree with me: "It will be a major upset if those two [Dean and Gephardt] do not finish on top in Iowa...My guess is that the reward for finishing third will be minimal." Great minds...)

So last night over dinner I was talking to someone who had been a top official of the McCain campaign in 2000. Out of nowhere, he said something like, "I had to laugh when I saw all these stories that say it's o.k. for Lieberman and Clark to stay out of Iowa, because McCain stayed out of Iowa and it didn't hurt him. None of the stories mention that McCain lost!"

That's not something that had ever occurred to me. I assumed that skipping Iowa and putting his attention into New Hampshire set McCain up for his big win there, and then the wild ride through South Carolina, where the Bush attack machine got him, followed by a comeback in Michigan but it wasn't quite enough.

This person's theory was that, if McCain had participated in Iowa, he might have come in third, setting him up as the key rival to Bush in the party. I guess it might have got him going a week or so earlier than he did. The other part of this person's argument was that building an organization in Iowa is simply proof of a campaign's national scope and organizational ability. Maybe. I think that's the old Carter theory once again, romanticizing the idea that he just out-organized his rivals in Iowa. Today I'm pretty certain that the only way to get somewhere with the 100,000 of Iowa Democrats who give up their evenings for the caucuses is through preestablished organizations, especially labor. But I could be wrong about that. I certainly hadn't considered the possibility that McCain made a mistake in bypassing Iowa. I still think that, even if he had done well there, he would have lost the nomination in South Carolina. But it shows how tough these decisions are.