MO GOES NOWHERE:

Iowa Ice Capades: Is Hillary coldly competent or warmly personable? And if her own campaign can’t figure it out, how can voters? (John Heilemann, Dec 30, 2007, New York)

Like their counterparts across Iowa, the Democrats of Woodbury County, which encompasses Sioux City, have come to expect a vast degree of obeisance from their party’s would-be nominees. They expect more than speeches, more than rallies, more than rote fund-raisers. They expect, in particular, that the candidates will appear before something called the Truman Club, an outfit run by local Democratic pols that hosts a series of intimate, private receptions with them as a prelude to the caucuses. And, indeed, in the past few months, every Democratic runner has turned up and kowtowed to the club. Every runner, that is, except Hillary Clinton—whose campaign twice promised that she would come, only to bail out later.

I heard this story on a frigid night recently in Sioux City from guy I knew in college named Dave Bernstein, who runs a steel company there. The Bernstein I remember wasn't exactly the student-council type, so I was surprised to learn that he’d signed on as a precinct captain for Barack Obama. But I was more startled to hear his take on where the race stood in his hometown. “Seems like it’s between us and Edwards here,” Bernstein said. “The Clinton campaign never really connected with the local leadership; they’re just not tapped in here. And the Truman Club thing? A major, major dis.”

Woodbury, to be sure, is just one of 99 counties in Iowa. And Lord knows it’s dangerous, especially when it comes to the Hawkeye State, whose mysteries are a cause of perpetual befuddlement to even the sharpest political minds, to make too much of a single anecdote. But what’s striking about the Truman Club story is that it reinforces a broader narrative: of a Clinton operation that badly misread and misplayed Iowa for months; of a top-heavy, Beltway-centric beast that never found its footing and that now confronts the possibility of a potentially devastating loss.

Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush easily overcame early "devastating" losses, but that was on the Republican side. The danger for Ms Clinton is that rather than aping them, and buckling down after a good thrashing, she may try to imitate her husband and pretend that she had a good showing. Pretending to learn some humility would serve her candidacy far better.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 2, 2008 9:38 PM