DES MOINES, Iowa — Heated? For sure. Intense? Of course.
Yet the Iowa caucus campaign, now nearly coming to a close, has been a surprisingly civilized affair, four years after caucus-goers appeared to punish two presidential hopefuls for playing too rough.
This time, the exception illustrates the rule.
“If I believed half of that stuff, I wouldn’t vote for myself,” Republican Mike Huckabee told reporters Saturday.
The object of his unhappiness? An ad aired by the campaign of rival Mitt Romney that said he had “granted 1,033 pardons and commutations, including 12 convicted murderers more clemencies than the previous three governors combined.”
Unable to challenge the facts marshaled by his rival’s campaign, Huckabee sought to deflect the criticism.
“I had 8,700 requests. I denied 90 percent of them,” he said.
“Some may not have turned out the way I hoped, but most did.” In fact, Romney’s ad stood out not so much for its negativity, but for its very existence in a year in which both parties are experiencing wide-open races for the White House.
“There were lessons learned last time that no one wanted to repeat,” said Steve McMahon, who worked for Howard Dean in the 2004 campaign and now is a Democratic strategist. “Namely that the attacker wasn’t the beneficiary of the attack, and they turned out to be their own victim.”
In the past, “the Democrats were always having a food fight on its way to a fist fight on its way to a knife fight,” said Dennis Goldford, a professor at Drake University who has studied Iowa’s caucuses for two decades.
This time, he said, “I think that while we had the occasional occurrence of something that seems like a personal attack, by and large it has been fairly civil.”
Among Republicans, he singled out Romney for his ads critical of Huckabee. “Huckabee is keying his whole campaign to religious conservatives who want to claim they bring a moral dimension to politics. It’s tough to claim that you’re the candidate of morality and principle and then slime them the next day,” Goldford said.
If anything, the Democratic campaign in Iowa is far more unpredictable than the two-way Republican contest. Polls recently have made it a too-close-to-predict race.
