Unsettled In Iowa
Bill Curry

Out of devotion to Sen. Chris Dodd, Connecticut broadcast legend Duby McDowell and Kathleen Curry, a legend in my family, are in Iowa working their political magic on unsuspecting senior citizens. Were they selling, say, aluminum siding, there'd be laws to constrain them. It being politics, the market is unregulated, which means all sales are final.

Talented as they are, they have their work cut out for them. Dodd's run a fine race. But Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards came to Iowa with national cachet β€” and enough cash to fill a corn silo. By Friday, spending just for TV ads topped $33 million, triple the 2004 total.

Pundits predict heavy Democratic turnout, due to exasperation with President Bush and enthusiasm for their candidates. Dodd's organization is strong. If he finishes fourth in the eight-person field, he wakes up the next morning the only second-tier candidate still alive.

Getting voters to the polls is hard; to caucuses even harder, let alone in the dead of winter and on the heels of holidays. Retirees tell my savvy sources they might not show if the weather outside is frightful. In Iowa, where everyone is twice as polite as anyone back East, that means they aren't coming unless a driver, fully armed, drags them from their homes.

Regardless of the weather, pundits forecast low Republican turnout due to muted exasperation with Bush and utter lack of enthusiasm for the choices. John McCain, last seen at 7 percent in Iowa polls, is mounting a late effort, hoping to capitalize on a recent turnabout in his fortunes nationally and in New Hampshire.

McCain's revival is due less to his strengths than to others' weaknesses. Former front-runner Rudy Giuliani is tanking like a guy thrown in the East River in cement shoes, to pick a random analogy. Fred Thompson has audiences wondering how he made a living as an actor. You wouldn't believe Mitt Romney if he told you his blood type while lying on an operating table. Ron Paul's a novelty act, and even I don't know who Duncan Hunter is.

That leaves McCain and Mike Huckabee. Their appeal is partly their willingness to take stands that don't spring directly from a pollster's forehead. Huckabee, a Baptist minister, lent a rare dollop of humanity to debates when he chided opponents for being unloving. McCain says stuff he doesn't believe β€” think reversal on immigration or kowtowing to the "Christian" right β€” but with a pained look that says at least he isn't lying to himself.

Huckabee's an appealing dark horse but a flawed front-runner, so McCain's stock may rise further. McCain may also be helped by renewed attention being paid to foreign policy.

The death of Benazir Bhutto has convulsed Pakistan, unsettled America and cast a shadow over the world. It reflects our ever-deepening narcissism that the questions being asked here are what we should tell Pakistan to do and how her killing affects the caucuses.

Bhutto's murder is the moral responsibility of the men who killed her. Still, it ought to be a lesson to Bush, Condoleezza Rice and everyone who leaned on President Pervez Musharraf to let her back into Pakistan. Five years into Iraq and Afghanistan, we still don't get that meddling in the politics of cultures we don't understand is both undemocratic and futile.

Like Bush, McCain blamed Bhutto's murder on radical Islamists, a possible but by no means certain explanation. McCain gives Pakistan unsolicited advice, apparently as unaware as Bush that in the Muslim world, anything we're for is instantly less likely to happen. He says if he were president, "I'd be meeting with the National Security Council and I'd be seeing ways we could restore order." Meaning what, another intervention?

John McCain is a very good man with very bad ideas about how to make us safe. Still, his experience may help him. It's less clear on the Democratic side. Clinton's experience lies in domestic policy and politics, not foreign policy. Democratic voters probably will stay focused on problems such as Iraq, health care and global warming, regardless of world events.

If foreign policy experience does matter, someone may yet notice that Clinton, Obama and Edwards don't have five years of it among them, while Dodd, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson have nearly a century.

Were I a Dodd volunteer, I'd tell voters my guy's the one with 30-plus years of congressional experience, who knows it's up to Pakistan to restore its own order. Were I an Iowa voter, I'd ask which candidate knows that democracy and nonviolence must be modeled, never imposed.

Bill Curry, former counselor to President Bill Clinton, was the Democratic nominee for governor twice. His column appears Sundays on the Other Opinion page. He can be reached at billcurryct@gmail.com.

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