Richard Whalen

Turnout in the January 3rd Iowa competitive precinct caucuses is expected to be somewhat lower than the average 15 percent of registered voters in recent years. On the Republican side especially, Mitt Romney, the early free-spending frontrunner who has invested $7 million, has fizzled and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has jumped into the lead despite the fact that he felt obliged to apologize to Romney for a remark he made about the Mormon religion in a long New York Times Sunday Magazine article.

Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal “In my lifetime, faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics but not the sole determinate one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress. ”

Has the presidency become a quasi-religious office? Huckabee, 53, has spent half his career as a Baptist preacher, and half as a politician. The rest of the field seems to be underwhelming most Iowa conservatives, who are cool to Arizona’s Senator John McCain and New York’s former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. And yet McCain just won the editorial endorsements of the Des Moines Register and a hundred retired generals and admirals. The latter count heavily in the upcoming South Carolina primary, January 19. (A similar group of brass hats passed over McCain in favor of Bush in 2000.

Giuliani, who strutted into Iowa looking like a tough-guy world beater, has gotten into trouble with women voters who have reacted to his three marriages and estrangement from his children. Rudy is no longer strutting.

Among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton also received the Register’s valuable endorsement but she no longer looks quite so “inevitable.”

Barack Obama, launched by Oprah’s celebrity, has drawn even with Hillary and alarmed Bill Clinton enough to attack him personally. The beneficiary of the Clinton-Obama clash is smooth-talking John Edwards, whose populist appeal gains resonance as the economic issues emerge as most urgent.

Iowa is usually right about the identity of the leading candidates but not necessarily about who will win. In 1972, Iowa democrats gave Senator George McGovern a better-than-expected second place showing against frontrunner Edmund Muskie* and in 1976 with Georgia’s little-known Governor Jimmy Carter. Carter’s follow-up win in the New Hampshire primary catapulted him into the presidency. I predict an upset win for Edwards in Iowa and a surprising showing in New Hampshire.

Among younger Democratic voters, without Bush to vote against, there’s little incentive to come out in the caucuses or the general election, says voter turnout expert Curtis Gans of American University in Washington, DC. He says the “intensity factor” is very small so far.

In the end, how important is Iowa? No delegates are selected. In the end, the whole thing may be determined by the holidays and the weather: volunteers reluctant to ring doorbells over Christmas and the strength of each candidate’s infrastructure to get voters out during a possible snowstorm.

*Corrected from earlier version