They Know How to Caucus

In addition to Vilmain, Clinton has grabbed another top Vilsack strategist, Des Moines lawyer Jerry Crawford, a horse-racing enthusiast who has had a seemingly magic touch, advising the caucus campaigns of every eventual Democratic nominee since 1980.

The Guessing Game

With more than seven months before the caucuses, the contours of the caucus campaign, 2008 version, are anything but certain.

The two candidates ahead in the polls -- Edwards on the Democratic side and Romney on the Republican -- are the ones who have spent the most time and money building an organization here. But the commitment of other candidates to waging an all-out campaign in Iowa has appeared to waver.

The Clinton memo caused a huge stir, though rival campaigns have speculated that the leak may have been deliberate, to allow Clinton to reaffirm her commitment to the state.

Two leading Republicans, McCain and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, announced yesterday that they are opting out of one ritual for GOP candidates in the state: the August straw poll in Ames. No candidate has skipped the straw poll and gone on to win the caucuses in the past 30 years, but their decision is likely to sharply reduce the influence of the poll, which traditionally has winnowed the Republican field in the months before the primary season begins in earnest.

The Giuliani campaign made the announcement first, saying that it is "100 percent committed to winning the Iowa caucuses" but will use the money it would have spent in Ames to campaign later in the year. The McCain campaign then said that because Giuliani would be absent, the straw poll would not be "a meaningful test of the leading candidates' organizational abilities," and so it was opting out, too.

Whether the withdrawals from the straw poll will also diminish this year's GOP caucuses remains to be seen, said Arthur Sanders, a political scientist at Drake University.

But, he said, the flurry of calculations about how hard to play in Iowa serves as a reminder that one of an Iowa strategist's toughest calls is a cold-eyed appraisal of a campaign's prospects in the state. In late 2003, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) was riding high in the polls in Iowa and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) was considering pulling back. But his Iowa staff persuaded him to stay, and a few months later, he won a comeback victory that launched him to the nomination and crushed Dean, who finished third, behind Edwards.

The prevailing theory in Iowa is that Dean lacked the state-rooted leadership that his rivals had. His Iowa staff members overstated their support even to themselves and did not effectively deploy the hundreds of volunteers who flocked to the state. Meanwhile, the Kerry and Edwards teams kept up with the basic organizing groundwork.

In the Kerry campaign, this tone was set out by Crawford, the Iowa chairman, and its manager, John Norris, another former Vilsack chief of staff. Norris is heralded for having kept his staff focused despite poor poll numbers, for tracking down veterans by using tax rolls and for getting Kerry to be more succinct on the stump.

Norris, a youthful-looking 48-year-old from Red Oak, in southwest Iowa, is not with a campaign this time because he is head of the state utilities board and because his wife, Jackie Norris, a New Yorker who first came to Iowa to work on Vilsack's 1998 campaign, is working for the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

On a recent evening, as he watched his three young sons at a playground while his wife attended a late meeting, Norris had a simple explanation for what worked in 2004. "It's understanding the mindset of how Iowans approach the caucus," he said. "They're not just judging the candidate but the organization of the campaign. If you give them the sense you understand the caucus and the party, they'll respond."