In Iowa, a Scrambling Lesson for Clinton

From the outset, Clinton faced an uphill fight in Iowa, a state in which her husband was never forced to develop an infrastructure in his two runs for the White House. But in this campaign, her rivals moved quickly to assemble teams of veteran operatives.

Still, her initial strategy did not put special emphasis on the caucuses, treating them as part of a national campaign. Obama, meanwhile, assembled a team of advisers with lengthy track records in Iowa and frequently made the short trip from his home state to lay the groundwork for his bid. Edwards never lost his grip on a core of supporters from his 2004 campaign.

The chief concern, one person with immediate knowledge of the campaign said, was that Clinton simply did not visit Iowa enough over the summer and early fall -- a common complaint in national campaigns, but one that the Clinton team was unaccustomed to. No one on her senior staff has ever been through the grueling caucus process, which emphasizes direct contact with voters and is difficult to measure through traditional polls. In one infamous incident, a campaign memo from deputy director Mike Henry floated the idea of skipping the caucuses altogether -- further offending some in the state, but ultimately forcing the campaign to publicly recommit itself to campaigning in Iowa once the memo was rejected.

Another challenge facing Clinton's organizers, officials said, was sheer logistics. About 60 percent of her supporters say they have never been to a caucus, making it critical that she devise a strategy to lure them out on Jan. 3.

It was not until October that senior officials at Clinton headquarters realized there was something of a disconnect between the candidate and the sentiments of participants in Iowa's quirky system, two campaign insiders said. And it was Clinton who sounded the alarm bell, they said.

"She got it before anybody else, and she dragged them kicking and screaming to take it seriously and to focus," said one person who has worked for both Clintons. "She recognized you couldn't manage a state from a thousand miles away. You had to get in there, you had to be on the ground, and see and feel what she was seeing and feeling."

Teresa Vilmain, a veteran of the caucus process who was brought in as Clinton's state director in Iowa in late spring, said the caucuses are "first and foremost about relationships -- that is what you start with." For Clinton, she said, the challenge was building up those relationships over the relatively short course of the year.

"We have a game plan, we've had one from the day I got here, which was to introduce Hillary Clinton to this state, remind them of what she has done," Vilmain said. She said that it was for that reason that the campaign held organizing events around each of Clinton's visits in the summer, such as her major speeches on Iraq, the economy and health care.

Still, the October meeting in Chicago prompted the senior staff in Arlington to focus on how competitive the race had become and what the ramifications would be if she lost or finished third. Shortly thereafter, the campaign dramatically increased its staff on the ground in Iowa, bought additional advertising time and moved a senior communications specialist to Des Moines. Former governor Tom Vilsack, a key Clinton surrogate in the state, was quoted the next month as saying the candidate had not initially understood the importance of relationship-building in Iowa -- but that she had figured it out.

"We were being out-organized," one person directly involved with the effort said flatly.

Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist, said she never expected to glide to victory in Iowa; if anything, she was simply pleased that "at some point this became a competitive race."

"It's really a three-way, close race" in Iowa, Penn said. "It's an extremely close race all around."