White House Rivals Hope to Pass Iowa Test

The farm towns and city precincts of Iowa were alive with a final burst of political heat and motion on Sunday before the first presidential test of 2000, as five Republican and two Democratic candidates pressed to turn out supporters and pick up fence-sitters before today’s crucial Iowa caucuses.

The balloting that begins at 7 p.m. CST in private homes, civic clubs and church halls across the state could set the parameters of the race as it heads into the New Hampshire primary next week, helping determine who has the staying power for the steeplechase of the primaries that follows.

On Sunday, the two front-runners, Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush, leaned heavily on their disciplined campaign organizations as they exhorted loyalists to get out to vote at more than 2,100 sites throughout the state.

While the vice president urged a small crowd in the Mississippi River town of Clinton to avoid “the slightest hint of complacency or over-confidence,” Bush tried to ward off stinging criticism by Republican rivals that he has tried to mute abortion as a campaign issue.

The Texas governor said on ABC-TV’s “This Week” that if he is elected, he will fill any Supreme Court vacancies with “strict constructionist” judges who base their rulings on rigid readings of the Constitution--a subtle signal to anti-abortion activists who believe the high court overreached in legalizing abortion in 1973.

Bush continued the ideological tightrope walk he has led in recent days, both emphasizing his opposition to abortion and conceding that the nation is not ready to outlaw the controversial medical procedure. “I’ve been a pro-life governor,” Bush said, adding: “I understand good people can disagree on the issue.”

Despite a final campaign week that saw the candidates racing across the state with unflagging spirits and drawing impressive crowds, the 2000 presidential race has remained nearly as static as it started out.

Gore got off to a stumbling start last year, marred by weak public performances and a vigorous challenge from former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who unexpectedly matched the vice president dollar for dollar in fund-raising and resurrected national health care as a campaign priority. But Gore recovered to a point where he now is aiming for a commanding enough victory in Iowa to throttle any chance of a Bradley bounce heading into New Hampshire.

That state appears to be the battleground for a close-range Republican contest next week between Bush and Sen. John McCain of Arizona. McCain has avoided Iowa, leaving Bush to stave off a pack of more conservative rivals who include wealthy businessman Steve Forbes, Christian social activists Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes and Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.

The Iowa contest has long been dominated by the state’s political partisans and, often poorly attended, is expected to draw little more than 10% of the state’s 1.8 million registered voters. Hence the night often goes to party favorites who ally with potent organizations such as labor unions and religious activists to bring out the largest faction of supporters.

Under the caucus system, Iowans assemble at voting sites to declare their support for candidates and begin the complicated process of awarding the state’s delegates to the national nominating conventions. But with thousands of reporters surveying tonight’s first stage of the complex process, the vote has become the first weather vane of the political season. The weather itself is a crucial element, and tonight’s forecast of sub-zero temperatures and snow flurries could aid Gore and Forbes, whose strong organizations have the heft to turn out Iowans no matter what.

Despite recent polls that showed Gore and Bush with daunting leads as they approached today’s caucuses, their rivals crossed the state’s rural terrain Sunday, barnstorming by plane and convoying by bus for one last go at an under-the-radar upset--or at least a strong enough showing to exceed expectations.

Bradley, bolstered by an endorsement in Sunday’s Des Moines Register, the state’s largest newspaper, and campaigning side by side with maverick Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, insisted that he was “in this campaign for the duration.” The Register’s own polling showed Bradley losing to Gore, 56% to 28%, but his aides held out hope that undecided voters could tighten the contest in its final hours.

Traveling across eastern and central Iowa by bus and by plane, Gore told his backers not to go easy on Bradley despite the polls. “The only decision that matters is the one that will come out of the caucus itself--the one in your precinct,” he said in Clinton. Despite New Hampshire polls that a month ago showed him going stride for stride with Gore, Bradley never seemed to build on that burst of interest. The premise of his campaign, a call for a national effort to use broadened health care coverage to lift up poor Americans left behind by the country’s economic prosperity, has yet to catch fire with Democratic party loyalists.

If there was a turning point in the Democratic race, it appeared to come in Iowa earlier this month, when Bradley seemed flat and even disengaged at a debate focusing on agriculture and the victims of Iowa’s devastating 1993 floods. Bradley seemed aloof in responding to a question about his vote against a flood aid provision in the Senate and then spent precious days trying to atone for his performance. Late last week, new revelations about Bradley’s history of an irregular heartbeat--coupled with the candidate’s failure to update his medical condition until forced to--compounded his image problems.

At the same time, Gore benefited from the strong institutional support of the Democratic establishment. Each day last week, he brought in the party’s big guns, trotting out Cabinet secretaries and congressional stars alike, one day Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, the next, liberal lion Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. And Gore benefited from the muscle of Iowa’s labor movement, from teachers to auto workers, which plans to deliver tens of thousands of supporters tonight.

Given recent polls showing Gore with a lead in excess of 20 percentage points, independent analysts suggested that the vice president needs to top Bradley by at least high double digits if he hopes to prevent the challenger from getting any lift heading into New Hampshire.

“My sense is that if Gore doesn’t beat Bradley by roughly 2 to 1, it shows a certain weakness,” said Dennis Goldford, a Drake University political science professor. “If Bradley gets out with better than 40%, it could scuff Gore up a bit, especially when Bradley seems to have some support laying in wait in New Hampshire.”

On the Republican side, Bush aides asserted that a 37% showing--his standing in several polls--would constitute a solid victory, matching Bob Dole’s best-ever finish against a multi-candidate GOP field in 1988. Still, Bush is running against a considerably weaker crop of candidates.

The one hopeful who has emerged as a faint threat to his nomination is McCain, who slogged Sunday through snowy Concord, N.H., playing up his role as a crusading reformer.

Because McCain decided to forgo the Iowa contest, some analysts suggested that Bush needs to win tonight with upward of 45% to walk away with his leviathan image unscarred. “If more than half the Republicans don’t vote for Bush, that has to be a little cause for concern,” argued GOP pundit and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol.

Bush, a two-term governor who hopes to follow his father to the White House, emerged two years ago as the favorite candidate of a powerful faction of GOP party leaders, among them Michigan Gov. John Engler and Pennsylvania Gov. Thomas J. Ridge.

Bush then assiduously courted Republican party donors, amassing an unprecedented $67 million--enough of a cache that he was able to spurn federal matching funds, which augments the amount of money candidates reap but forces them to adhere to strict fund-raising rules.

For Republicans, the caucuses actually represent their second test of strength here. A symbolic straw poll in August turned out to be surprisingly consequential. With their enormous financial edge, Bush and Forbes finished first and second in the contest, while a pair of serious rivals--former Vice President Dan Quayle and onetime Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander--were forced from the race by their poor showing. Former Cabinet secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole later dropped out as well.

Since then, “the message was basically that none of the other candidates was going to catch up” with Bush, said the University of Iowa’s Arthur Miller. That has sucked “a lot of the drama and excitement out of the Republican race.”

Forbes hoped to place a strong enough second to invigorate a campaign that has never achieved any sort of traction, despite spending $20 million--a tidy sum still dwarfed by Bush’s vast war chest.

On Sunday, Forbes reprised complaints that the Bush campaign was behind a negative telephone campaign that was being waged against him. The millionaire magazine publisher said that a spate of telephone calls that have flooded his Iowa headquarters phone lines at a rate of 100 to 200 a day were a “typical procedure of the Republican establishment.” Later, his own aides acknowledged similar tactics by his camp.

The other GOP contestants in Iowa, Bauer, Keyes and Hatch, all were battling it out for third place and perhaps the last political ticket out of Iowa to New Hampshire on Tuesday morning. All have found themselves struggling to swim upstream against the Bush tide.

Even on his morning-of-worship Sunday, Bauer, who has hoped for a solid foundation of social conservative support, ran head-on into the phenomenon that has reduced him and the other Republicans to also-rans.

When he went to attend Sunday services at the First Assembly of God Church in Des Moines, Bauer found that Bush, seemingly everywhere else in this political season, was there too.

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Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Matea Gold, Maria L. La Ganga, Anne-Marie O’Connor in Iowa and T. Christian Miller in Concord, N.H., contributed to this story.

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