Easing off on Iowa.

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 21

TWO spokesmen for the Democratic party in Iowa professed surprise, and threatened reprisal and death for the two candidates who announced that they were pulling out of the state caucus. Gen. Clark said that there was no way to catch up with the organization that other candidates had invested in beginning months earlier. Joe Lieberman's spokesmen put it this way: Why should Joe keep his 17 full-time vote recruiters in Iowa, where his poll standing wasn't all that encouraging? Why not send them to New Hampshire? "There is no victory in being fourth in Iowa."

Democratic chieftains in Iowa are dismayed. If you subtract two key candidates from their caucus, then all that you are left with is a popularity contest among those who show up. State Democratic chairman Gordon Fischer, scowling, held up for review the images of two other candidates who had spurned Iowa. Look what happened to Gore in 1988! And to McCain in 2000!

But with all due respect to Iowa, there is a creeping recognition among analysts that it does not pay off to bind the presidential political future to the Iowa casino on January 19. One of the perceived favorites in Iowa at the moment is Dick Gephardt, who is to Democratic politics what Old Faithful is to Yellowstone Park, always there, always institutionally reassuring, guaranteed not ever to cross a picket line. Are the Iowa Democrats promising that if Gephardt wins in Iowa, he will win at the convention in Boston in July?

The stake Democrats have in events in Iowa is felt keenly in tracing the speed of the political calendar. New Hampshire happens one week after Iowa. Exactly one week after that, you get South Carolina--and also Arizona, Delaware, Missouri, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. At that point you have four long days to wait for Michigan, then one more day for Maine, two more for Tennessee and Virginia. Then Wisconsin on February 17, Idaho on February 24, and just about everybody else on March 2.

The nervous Democrat, observing the leftward heel of the candidates, will understandably worry lest a launch in Iowa set up a momentum that would take the party right to the nomination in July and defeat in November. They have been listening to Dean and Gephardt denouncing George Bush in terms so categorical as to arouse an indignation in those who voted for Bush. If he is the same monstrous creature depicted by the Democrats maybe he should be not only defeated, but exiled. And those who voted for him? Placed on probation for a few years, before being set loose to vote again?

In their creeping ferocity, the Democratic campaigners welcome any fuse-shortening between Iowa and the nomination. But if the cordite being lighted in Iowa sizzles through to climax in Boston for a candidate that 49 other states have second thoughts about, the Democrats need to worry that second thoughts aren't given much of a chance to be thought, in the lightning-speed political calendar.

If the absence of two candidates from Iowa has the effect of making the Iowa caucus less than conclusive, much will have been gained. Party elders might then look up at Joe Lieberman, and decide to go for the unglamorous senator who, however, has not lost his head.