Rudy Goes Old School and Talks Delegate Count

Rudy Goes Old School and Talks Delegate Count

Way back in the dark ages, before George Bush 41 coined the term "Big Mo" in 1980, "delegate count" was the phrase-that-pays in nomination contests. Voting first still made Iowa matter, but the results from early states were placed in the context of overall progress to the nomination and wasn't the whole ballgame the way, say, the whole 2004 Democratic contest began and ended in Iowa.

It's delegates, not Big Mo(mentum), that officially determines nominations. In recent years, you didn't get the delegates without the Mo, but Rudy Giuliani is looking to change that. With his war chest and name ID, his approach is to try just hard enough in the early GOP contests to avoid taking a major hit, and then clean up in the delegate count on Tsunami Tuesday.

Two of his top advisers laid out the strategy (Monday), arguing that traditional make-or-break states such as Iowa and New Hampshire matter less than big states that are voting earlier this year, such as Florida, New York and New Jersey. "There are multiple paths to victory," said Michael DuHaime, Giuliani's campaign manager, adding that the team has a long-term plan. With so many populous states voting early, "It is impossible to think that it will be over after only three states vote," he said.

So Giuliani's allocating his resources and essentially conceding Iowa and New Hampshire to Mitt Romney.  Romney's quite clearly sticking to the early state strategy.  "Clearly, someone like myself, who's not a household name across the country, I want to do well in the early states to drive the attention to my campaign and my message," the former Massachusetts governor told the Associated Press on Tuesday. "I'm just following the same path that every nominee for president has followed in the past."  Every nominee in the post-Jimmy Carter caucus era, that is.

Giuliani may also be gambling that resentment of the oversized role of Iowa's caucuses will backlash in his favor. Remember that leaked memo in August: "Florida is the firewall"? How many guys like these two that the AP found are out there?

In Orlando, Fla., retired Army Col. Terry Fiest says he doesn't take marching orders from the early states. "I think Iowa is a myth," Fiest says. "Iowa is like the starting gate of a marathon. I don't even gauge Iowa." His friend Craig Hartwig, who lives in Mount Doro, Fla., adds: "We're not bandwagon people."

Giuliani's big-state, sort of screw-Iowa strategy is helped by Republican rules. The Democrats split delegates proportionally at every level of contest. But the GOP still allows winner-take-all contests, and some of Giuliani's strongest Feb. 5 states -- New York (101 delegates), New Jersey (52 delegates), and Connecticut (30 delegates) -- are winner-take-all. A 25 percent win over a splintered field in just those three states puts Rudy almost 20 percent of the way to the nomination itself.

The tightrope Giuliani has to walk: hoarding his time and money for Tsunami Tuesday while trying just hard enough in expensive, labor-intensive, high-maintenance Iowa and New Hampshire, where they expect you to show up (!) and answer questions (!!!) to avoid an embarrassing fourth or even fifth place.

Fifth?

Romney wins, everyone expects that. Fred Thompson picks up some social conservative support with that National Right To Life (sic) endorsement. Mike Huckabee gets the Fair Taxers and social conservatives who aren't comfortable with Romney's religion and Thompson's Hollywood image.  That would slot Rudy in fourth. 

So how does fifth happen for Giuliani?

Does anyone really know how many people are going to come out of nowhere to caucus for Ron Paul? This is the million-dollar question for Republicans.  Is Paul going to be the shocker like Pat Robertson with his second place finish in `88? There's no caucus turnout model that can predict that one.  But Paul clearly has the true believers who could turn out disproportionately.

Fifth is a long shot, but for Giuliani fourth is very, very possible. And as political columnist David Yepsen of The Des Moines Register is so fond of saying, there are only three tickets out of Iowa: first-class, coach and standby. At a certain point, the critical mass of the delegate count starts to be affected by the delta-vee of momentum. For that reason, expect Rudy Giuliani to pay a little more attention to the early states despite the strategic spin.