Iowa, la tentación de Romney

New York Magazine:

The ambivalence toward Iowa on Team Romney is rooted in a history at once recent and terrifically traumatic. In 2008, the former Massachusetts governor spent more than $10 million on the caucuses, blanketing the airwaves with more than 8,000 ads and deploying an army of organizers—on the theory that if he could pull off a victory and then repeat the feat a few days later in New Hampshire, where he had led in the polls for much of 2007, he could effectively pocket the nomination before his rivals even knew what hit them.

But, of course, it was not to be. Instead, Romney was beaten—beaten bloody, beaten senseless—in Iowa by Mike Huckabee, who spent virtually nothing and yet still came away with a stunning nine-point triumph. The loss was humiliating for Romney; moreover, it was crippling. Limping into New Hampshire, he was soundly thumped there by John McCain, and that was pretty much all she wrote.

No surprise, then, that this time around the Romney campaign has pursued a dramatically different strategy in Iowa: a rigorous minimalism replacing the balls-out maximalism of four years ago. In addition to the paucity of in-person visits, Romney has aired no TV ads; declined to participate in the straw poll in August; failed to show up for another major Iowa event (the Faith & Freedom Coalition dinner) last month and will forgo yet another (the state GOP’s annual Ronald Reagan Dinner) this Friday; and employs just a skeleton staff of five (a senior strategist, a state director, and three field staffers). His campaign’s message to Iowa, in other words, hasn’t quite been “Drop dead,” but no one could remotely mistake it for “Let’s roll,” either.

(...) Thus is the situation in Iowa—apparently, potentially—presenting Romney with an unexpected and golden opportunity. With social conservatives split among a handful of candidates, including Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich as well as Perry and Bachmann, a last-­minute burst of organizing and advertising might allow the national front-runner to steal a victory in the caucuses. And if he did, Romney would then be poised to execute the plan that tanked him in 2008: a one-two punch of wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he is far ahead right now, that would probably amount to a knockout blow to Perry, the only candidate in the Republican bunch with the financial wherewithal to wage an extended national primary campaign.

There are three problems with this scenario, however. The first has to do with Romney’s support in Iowa. In 2008, he carried 25 percent of the caucus vote, a proportion nearly identical to the share he currently commands in the Iowa polls. Is this a hard ceiling for him? It may not be: An influx of new, secular, and economically minded caucusgoers might push his total higher. But it may be, and if it is, there is a chance that social conservatives might yet coalesce behind an alternative candidate, boosting him or her to roughly 30 percent of the vote and denying Romney his win.

(...) If Romney decides to go all-in in Iowa, the national story line will shift in a direction that the candidate and his team have successfully kept it from doing all year—making the caucuses, instead of New Hampshire, the first test of his strength, and making central the question of whether Romney can slay the demons of 2008. “Iowa will become all about Mitt the minute he gets in it,” says a Republican operative unaligned with any campaign. “This will tell us whether Mitt Romney has really matured. If he’s grown up into a guy who could be president, he won’t do it. I think Iowa is Lucy and the football for him.”

A number of Romney’s senior advisers are broadly sympathetic to this view. But others are increasingly tempted to take the plunge. Below the radar, Romney’s people in Iowa have labored long and mightily to maintain the network of activists and volunteers who were behind the governor in the last go-round. And with each passing day that the field remains fragmented and Perry remains unable to revivify himself, the lure of Iowa only grows for those in Romney’s Boston brain trust.