THE VIEW FROM THE $2 WINDOW

By H. N. Burdett

After more debates than none but the most incurable of political junkies can calculate, after the roller coaster ride where only one passenger fell off and two or three others held on by their fingertips, the candidates are finally in the starting gate of the marathon for-real race to determine the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.

Before the wagering windows shut down at today's Iowa GOP caucuses, I'm putting my two bucks on a late entry - the pesky pony who a short while back preferred to bail out of this one and test his mettle on tracks more to his liking in New Hampshire and Florida.

Figuring that the Hawkeye State would be less hospitable to a flip-flopping erstwhile governor of Massachusetts than a more traditional conservative, Mitt Romney initially concluded that it made more sense to focus his time, his energy and his cash on venues where he has a reasonable chance rather than where history suggests he has less than a prayer.

When Herman Cain dropped out of the race, there was an opening in the Iowa caucuses for someone closer to a bona fide conservative to gain ground on Romney, who always topped out at between 23-25 per cent in the post-debate polls - a number approximating what remains of moderate strength in the Republican Party.

Surprisingly, in this season of surprises, the candidate around which former Cain supporters circled their wagons was former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker, history professor, unregistered lobbyist and serial monogamist, Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich's checkered past apparently caught up with him with a hard shove from the 45 percent of campaign advertising dollars spent in Iowa on revealing what he would as soon wish caucus voters to forget.

Heartland America family values and fiscal conservatism have been the most consistent traits of the Iowa GOP electorate. And Gingrich, despite invoking ad nauseam both his authorship of the Contract with (or on) America and Ronald Reagan's name at each and every opportunity, strikes out on both counts. His steadfast stand on amnesty for undocumented immigrants is another fault line that had those aforementioned circled wagons scrambling elsewhere.

Virtually every candidate in today's Iowa caucuses represents family values better than Gingrich, fueling his precipitous fall from grace. The beneficiary of these mass defections has been Rick Santorum, whose choir boy charm somehow provides veneer for the reality that his politics are so far to the right as to perhaps cause even Attila the Hun to wince. Santorum, prior to the Cain fall, had been even-money along with Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman as the triumvirate most likely to become toast by March 6, the Super Tuesday sweepstakes when eight states hold primaries and two others engage in caucuses.

Santorum's under-funded campaign was suddenly resuscitated. The former U.S. senator from Pennysylvania seized the moment with an astounding demonstration of retail politics. As one pundit characterized the feat: "He's bought everyone in Iowa at least one cup of coffee."

The Santorum candidacy has been magically endowed with fresh legs that should hold up and perhaps even enable him to cross the finish line ahead of the pack in Iowa. But the most loyal supporters in the race - a fact which even Romney has conceded - are backing the libertarian congressman from Texas, Ron Paul. How much a re-emergence of those embarrassing racist and anti-semitic newsletters once published under Paul's name will hurt his chances in Iowa remains to be seen. To say nothing of the fact that his well-established isolationism, inviting as it is to anti-war protesters, might have kept the United States out of World War II.

Should either Santorum or Paul win the Iowa caucuses, it remains problematic whether they will have the endurance to wage competitive campaigns prior to Super Tuesday. As of today, only Romney and Texas Governor Rick Perry appear to have the wherewithal to go the distance.

Among the candidates still standing, Perry is the reputed master of retail politics. Despite the weird absence of any semblance of debating skills for a seasoned politician, his combination of personality and pursestrings seem to make him Romney's last hurdle for capturing the party's nomination.

The irony is that Romney was initially prepared to ignore Iowa and stake his claim for the nomination in New Hampshire and Florida, where his chances for victory were viewed as far rosier. But when former Cain supporters coalesced around Gingrich, Romney's campaign picked up the unmistakable odor of big trouble. The Romney aim shifted to Iowa. More specifically, to make absolutely certain that Gingrich would not win today's caucuses.

A victory by either Santorum or Paul would have been easier for Romney to digest. Romney's money and organization are presumably better equipped to deal with either. But Gingrich is an altogether different kind of fish.

What gave Romney pause is Gingrich's ideology - about as easy to grasp as mercury, but which knee-jerk conservatives bought because it all seems to be coming from the smartest guy in the room. Considering those who are in that room, Gingrich's quirky utterances, often sprung from the top of his head and which he often enough later dismisses as a "mistake" or even "stupid," qualify him as a certifiable genius.

So Romney got into the Iowa hunt and soon learned that GOP caucus voters, in their resolve to deny President Obama a second term, just may be sufficiently pragmatic to vote for the one candidate in the GOP field whom the polls claim might have this capability.

"When voters actually start voting," says the Washington Post's David Ignatius, "they will be looking for the Republican who can fix the mess in Washington through strong management, as opposed to ideological fervor. And that person looks increasingly like Mr. Bland Competence himself, Mitt Romney. Republicans have been a flirtatious, fickle lot, but I would be surprised if they didn't settle on the only person in this field who has consistently looked and talked like someone who could be president."

Columnist Kathleen Parker opines that the economy is the first priority of conservative America in this election year. She adds that "most believe that Romney has the best skills for turning things around. In the hierarchy of Oz, he is the GOP's best brain."

Even the best prepared analyst would end up with a throbbing headache trying to gauge Ron Santorum's eleventh-hour momentum against the enthusiasm of Ron Paul loyalists, the estimated 350 to 500 Texans converging upon Iowa to tout Governor Perry, and Mitt Romney's organizational strength and dollars.

I feel comfortable enough in Romney's appeal to Iowans' pragmatism over ideology to manage a feat which only a few days back I compared to a miracle comparable to the parting of the Red Sea and the virgin birth combined, to put down a pair of singles on his patrician nose. But not comfortable enough to risk more than two.
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