“David, how are you?” Mitt Romney says as he strides into a conference room at the local headquarters of Vermeer, a 63-year-old family-owned and -operated agricultural machinery company in Pella, Iowa, and starts reaching for hands to shake. In the time it takes a nonpolitician to blink, he glances at the next name tag—“Mike! Great to be here”—and then the next, and the next, all the way around the table. “Gary! Curtis! Dennis! Doug! Robert! Diane! Bob! Barb! Ted!” If he didn’t throw in a few “nice to meet you” lines, you’d think Romney was greeting a bunch of old friends.
And so it begins, with a tableful of besuited business leaders, signs for stump cutters, crush chippers, and trenchers on the wall, 43 journalists watching from the wings, and the friendliest tone and firmest handshake he can muster. This, finally, is Mitt’s Iowa campaign.
Or is it?
To say that Romney has mixed feelings about Iowa would be something of an understatement. Schizophrenic is more like it.
In 2008, during his first run for president, Romney invested more than $10 million in the Hawkeye State. His goal, of course, was to win the caucuses. For a while, it looked as if he might succeed: thanks to his big spending and incessant barnstorming, the former Massachusetts governor established a lead in the polls in May 2007, expanded his edge to more than 15 percent in August, and was still frontrunning at the start of December, one month before the big day. Then something named Mike Huckabee happened, and the rest is history.
This time around, Romney has been less, shall we say, enthusiastic. Before Wednesday, he visited Iowa exactly once this year, in late May. Unlike Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann, he has yet to air an advertisement on local television. His paid staff—three people—is much skimpier than it was in 2008, when dozens of Romneyites flooded the state. He’s made it clear that he’s not competing in Saturday’s Ames straw poll, the early turnout test that he won in 2007—even though his name will appear on the ballot. Read More
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