2008 campaign is now a horserace

Now that everyone is sick and tired of presidential politics, it is getting interesting.

Go figure.

The fact of the matter is the campaign has finally reached the point where it is not just a dress rehearsal anymore. The all-important Iowa caucus is just seven weeks away, and the New Hampshire primary will probably be held on Jan. 8.

That means futures will be made and lost in the next two months, as first one candidate, then another, is crowned as front-runner, pummeled by the press, and fades into obscurity.

As usual, there have been some early favorites, but in a year with no incumbent president or vice president running, the idea of a favorite is more or less the same thing as being called flavor of the week. Everybody gets a turn.

On the Democratic side, Sen. Hillary Clinton has been holding a sizable lead in national polls for quite a few weeks, so the battle has really been over who will be her challenger. The betting, of course, has been on Sen. Barack Obama because he has raised the most money and has a confident, professorial quality that makes people trust him.

But as everyone knows, the entire race hinges on Iowa and New Hampshire, and here the story is quite different. In Iowa, Clinton has been locked in a three-way tie with Obama and former Sen. John Edwards for months. If either of them were to manage even a one-vote victory, the media would be blaring about the wounded candidacy of Hillary Clinton and the dynamics in New Hampshire a week later would be seriously altered, not to mention the national polls. Certainly, either Edwards or Obama could manage an upset in Iowa, but Obama is best poised to take advantage of it because of his much-larger war chest.

On the Republican side, things are much more fluid, although you might not guess it from the national media, which have focused so much of their attention on the national poll leader Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York, and on Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, who has been the consistent leader in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

But because of that strange dichotomy between the national polls and the all-important early states, no one can be sure of what will happen. Romney could well win in both the states where he has invested heavily and then discover he has no support anywhere else. And despite winning Iowa and New Hampshire, Romney might not get any ?bounce? because he has been expected to win there all along.

Meanwhile, Giuliani?s big lead nationally could crumble quickly if he finishes in third place or worse in Iowa, which could easily happen. He has only been tracking around 10 percent there, no surprise considering how little he has in common with farmers and Midwesterners. Everyone already expects Giuliani to be trounced by Romney, but he could also be beat by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Sen. Fred Thompson, maybe even by Sen. John McCain.

Whoever he gets beat by will certainly benefit from a surge of publicity and fund-raising and thus Giuliani will be vulnerable going into the maelstrom of states that follow quickly ? Michigan, South Carolina, Florida, Nevada and beyond. Clearly, if he loses big in the first two states when attention is focused on the race, he will be desperate to get a win somewhere, and quickly. His greatest fear has to be that someone becomes ?the story? coming out of Iowa and New Hampshire.

At this point, the most likely candidate to be ?the story? is Mike Huckabee, the witty ex-preacher from the same little town as Bill Clinton who seems to have the tenacity of another former Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. By all rights, Huckabee should be as irrelevant as Rep. Duncan Hunter or Sen. Chris Dodd. Small state, funny name, fuhgedaboudit.

Except Huckabee just keeps climbing. He?s playing a respectable fourth in the national polls now, behind Giuliani, Thompson and McCain, and about tied with Romney. But more importantly, he has now jumped into a virtual tie with Romney in Iowa, the latest poll last week showing Romney with 26 percent and Huckabee with 24 percent.

If anything close to that proves to be the result on Jan. 3, you can bet the national media will turn its spotlight on Huckabee and be writing off Romney as another winner who lost anyway (the most famous being President Lyndon Johnson, who beat Gene McCarthy in New Hampshire, but announced his withdrawal from the race shortly thereafter).

Huckabee doesn?t have much money on hand, and the primaries are stacked up like cars in a freeway collision in the two months after New Hampshire, but this isn?t your father?s primary campaign anymore. Money is important, but free publicity on cable TV and the Internet can easily make or break a career, let alone a campaign. Just ask Howard Dean. He went from the sure nominee to national laughingstock in just under 24 hours.

Which brings us to Ron Paul, the proverbial fly in the ointment. His supporters swear that he has support way beyond his marginal poll numbers. Time will tell. The Republican representative from Texas has certainly gotten his fair share of publicity with his unequivocating positions and tough attacks on both his opponents and the president.

But it seems unlikely there are too many voters who agree with Paul on all of his positions, and he takes such a hard line that he will probably alienate many voters. As an example, Paul gains many supporters because he is against the Iraq War and believes in a foreign policy of nonintervention for constitutional reasons, but many war opponents will be equally turned off by the candidate?s belief that abortion is unconstitutional.

Paul also favors legalizing the sale of narcotics, a policy which appeals to his former base among libertarians but will not please too many Republicans. Yes, some Democrats will be attracted by some of his more liberal policies, but they will probably disagree with him about his opposition to such issues as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal funding of education, and campaign finance reform, among many others.

But it would seem that, whoever gets the Republican nomination, we may not have heard the last of Ron Paul. If he can be persuaded to run on either the Libertarian or Constitution party tickets, he might siphon votes from whoever else runs and do at least as well as his fellow Texan Ross Perot did back in 1992. That would really turn the 2008 race into a free-for-all.

Like I said, it?s just getting interesting.

? Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com