"Edwards team... is the class of the field." (NY Mag "Escape From Iowa") LINK

[Blackhatjack]

A very insightful article that lays out the dynamics of the Iowa Caucuses and the strategies being pursued by the top Democratic Candidates. There is so much detail here that is not being covered by the MSM you need to read the entire article at the link provided below.

Edwards is a force in Iowa, and the other campaigns know it. Some of the excerpts are provided here in compliance with copyright restrictions.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/40989/index2.html

NY Magazine Article "Escape From Iowa"

Excerpts:

"Equally clear is that Edwards’s anti-Clinton tack is neither desperate nor impetuous. All along, there has never been much doubt that the time for serrated-edge contrast would come this fall. Or that Clinton would be the Democrat who would feel the blade. Everything that is happening now is part of a thoroughly calculated plan, long in gestation."

<snip>

"...the Edwards approach has its logic. Roughly 120,000 voters participated in the caucuses in 2004, and the savviest operatives in all three campaigns assume that something like half of likely caucusgoers are still undecided. (That public polls put the percentage at between 10 and 15 percent is dismissed as yet another sign of those polls’ notorious unreliability when it comes to Iowa.) For the Edwards campaign, the first crucial task in the next month and a half is to raise the stakes of the election in the eyes of those 60,000 undecided voters, to convince them that fundamental change is necessary, that not just any Democrat will do in 2008."

<snip>

"Methinks they doth protest too much. Indeed, the fact that Plouffe and Fischer are posturing this way suggests that the Obama forces continue to fear the prospect of being trumped by Edwards in Iowa. And with good reason. So far Obama has spent some $5 million on advertising in the state, and Clinton’s total is more than $3 million, whereas as of two weeks ago, Edwards had spent just $20,000. And yet the race remains a statistical three-way dead heat."

<snip>

"More to the point, because of the bizarro nature of the caucuses—the participants must go out, on a frigid night, for a multi-hour ordeal of public declarations of support and multiple rounds of voting—the contest in Iowa is a slog-it-out ground war, in which organization and get-out-the-vote efforts are paramount. And here all sides concede privately that Edwards’s team, which has been in place essentially for five years, is the class of the field. When I ask Edwards if he’s concerned about signs of slippage in Iowa, he literally laughs in my face. “We have 99 county chairs and about 75 percent of the precincts covered with precinct chairs,” he says. “I know how to run a caucus campaign in Iowa—and so do the people who work for me.”

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