Iowa is a warning to election-calling pundits and reporters

DES MOINES — John Kerry, the come-from-behind king of the Iowa caucuses, was more than entitled to a night of chest-thumping vindication.

Instead, shortly after midnight Tuesday, following the raucous victory rally and the obligatory TV interviews, Kerry radiated a sense of mellow satisfaction. The smiling, yet subdued, candidate was standing in the lobby of the Hotel Fort Des Moines, waiting to head to New Hampshire aboard his charter flight, surrounded by supporters more superficially exuberant than the senator himself.

Kerry briefly broke away from the adoring throng to muse to me and another reporter on how far he had journeyed on the road to political recovery. Harking back to the troubled days last fall, when his staff was in turmoil and the polls prophesied defeat, Kerry admitted, "There were some bleak moments, but we kept plodding on through." And he insisted, despite the skepticism of the press back then, "I felt things begin to move at the end of the summer, but it was really hard to break through to get attention."

His words offer a cautionary lesson for us all, campaign-trail reporters and politically minded citizens alike. It is so easy to be seduced by the ephemeral polls and gulled by endorsements and fund-raising statistics. Not too long ago, as the Kerry campaign was in the doldrums, there was glib talk that Howard Dean would run the table and rake in all the chips in a headlong rush to nomination. Such is the folly of pronouncing a campaign over before the first voters have rendered their verdict.

Now, with Dean having proved all too mortal in the Iowa caucuses, there is an irresistible tendency to overreact in the other direction. Suddenly Dean, the best-funded candidate in the history of Democratic presidential politics, is being bluntly told by the pundits that he must either win the New Hampshire primary or slink back home to Vermont in disgrace. There is no middle ground, no ambiguity and no acknowledgement that, despite the crowded primary calendar, Democrats appear to be in no hurry to anoint a nominee.

The Iowa caucuses, where everything is conducted in public, provided the best opportunity of the political season to watch voters wrestle with their decisions. At Mason Elementary School, near Drake University in Des Moines, Ann Reinhart was still undecided as she stood in line Monday night to sign in for her caucus. The landscape architect, who had never been to a caucus before, was clutching a Kerry sticker, but she was still trying to choose between the Massachusetts senator and John Edwards.

Like many Democrats this year, Reinhart was searching for something hard to categorize neatly — a mysterious mixture of charisma and electability — rather than being obsessed with the details of the candidates' policy positions.

As she explained, "I don't have a hot-button issue." Even after the caucus began, and Democrats in Precinct 46 split into preference groups, Reinhart stood on the dividing line between the Kerry and Edwards camps. She ultimately opted for Edwards, whom she finds inspiring, rather than the Kerry, who seems to her more presidential.

"I finally went with my heart rather than my head," she said.

Reinhart may be an extreme case in her reluctance to make a definitive decision, but her story is emblematic of the calculations and conniptions that Democrats across the country are going through. No choice seems binding until the final moment, as attorney David Efron, the Dick Gephardt coordinator in Precinct 46, learned on caucus night. Holding a four-page sheet of supposedly committed Gephardt supporters, Efron sadly noted the mismatch between his lists and the fewer than 20 Gephardt supporters (not enough to win a single delegate) who actually declared for Gephardt.

Despite February's cluttered primary calendar and the palpable eagerness of Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe for the party to coalesce around a nominee to jump-start the campaign against George W. Bush, the Iowa results underscore a what's-the-rush mood among ordinary Democrats. Wesley Clark and Joe Lieberman, who didn't compete in Iowa, have staked out beachheads in New Hampshire. It seems quite possible that at least three major candidates could still be jousting for position on the eve of the March 2 balloting, when 11 states — including California, New York and Ohio — choose delegates.

There is, however, a potential conflict between the rush-to-judgment sentiments of party leaders like McAuliffe and the sense that Democratic voters, divided post-Iraq by few hot-button issues, want to savor what they regard as an intriguing array of choices. The stunning last-minute charge of Edwards, the candidate who permanently disproved the notion that organization matters in Iowa, illustrates how open the party is to a little-known contender who frames the traditional Democratic argument against economic privilege in a fresh way. It is telling that Gephardt and Dean, the twin favorites in Iowa until a week ago, together received less than 30% support in the final reckoning.

Gephardt should leave the fray and elective office with the knowledge that he conducted a smart, disciplined campaign — and just happened to be running in a year when Democrats craved something more dynamic than the tried and true. And it is ironic that Dean, who always intended to battle through the primaries in hopes of benefiting from buyer's remorse about the favorite, was himself victimized in Iowa by second thoughts about the front-runner. Such is the price, whether temporary or permanent, that Dean paid for being the first insurgent candidate to rise to the top of the pile before a single vote was cast.

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