Nearly three years after candidates began traipsing to Iowa in search of support, caucus-goers will brave frigid conditions tonight to finally cast the first votes in the 2008 presidential election.
“After all the town meetings, the pie and coffee, it all comes down to this: Who is ready to be president and ready to start solving the big challenges we face on day one?” Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a two-minute ad that aired on Iowa TV stations Wednesday.
Clinton is locked in a three-way tie with rival Democrats Barack Obama and John Edwards, who also released last-minute ads Wednesday. The Democrats frantically criss-crossed Iowa in a final quest for votes, with Edwards even staying up for the last 36 hours of the campaign.
Political analysts said Clinton had the most to lose in Iowa, because she leads the national polls by a large margin and a defeat could undermine her image as the “inevitable” candidate. Obama, who has a war chest almost as large as Clinton’s, might have the most to gain, because a first-place finish here would help dispel the rap that he can’t win either the nomination or the general election. For Edwards, a strong performance in Iowa would vindicate his strategy of campaigning hard here for nearly three years in hopes of becoming one of the top two Democrats.
By contrast, several high-profile Republicans were missing from Iowa in the closing hours of the contest, including Rudy Giuliani. Having largely written off Iowa, the former New York mayor spent the day in New Hampshire, where he gave a speech calling for the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan to be doubled to 20,000.
Giuliani spokesman Jason Miller sought to portray his boss as the senior statesman in the campaign, addressing serious issues while rival Republicans were behaving like “kids playing in a sandbox, throwing stuff at each other,” he told The Examiner.
Also missing from Iowa was Republican Mike Huckabee, who flew to Los Angeles to appear on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”
“He seems more focused on the caucus in L.A. than the caucus in Iowa,” Republican Mitt Romney cracked.
Huckabee, who had surged ahead of Romneyin Iowa but stumbled in recent days, sought to portray the former Massachusetts governor as too rich for ordinary Americans.
“How many people in America who could relate to a person who could write checks for tens of millions of dollars to run for an office, and not miss it at all in his lifestyle?” Huckabee asked reporters. “How many people can relate to that?”
