Giuliani's baseball strategy

NY Times:

Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Fred D. Thompson all stumped in Iowa on Wednesday, 15 days before its caucuses. Senator John McCain campaigned in New Hampshire, 20 days before its primary.

And Rudolph W. Giuliani? He spent the day here in Missouri, where voters go to the polls 48 days from now. This month, while the other candidates have been braving the snow and ice in Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Giuliani has been campaigning in Florida, California, Illinois and other states that vote later in the year.

Mr. Giuliani’s decision to zag while the rest of the candidates zig reflects his unconventional campaign strategy: his team is concentrating on winning the Florida primary on Jan. 29 in the hopes that a victory there will position him to do well on Feb. 5, when more than 20 states, including Missouri, New York, New Jersey and California, go to the polls.

Mr. Giuliani likened the primary process to a baseball game here on Wednesday. “A baseball game, you’ve got to play nine innings,” he said, explaining his decision to focus on the big states at the end. “And whoever gets the most runs at the end of nine innings wins.

“So our strategy from the beginning has been an eight-, nine-inning game,” he said. “And as soon as we realized that California was going to be a Feb. 5 primary, we started campaigning in California, and putting a political organization in California. As soon as we realized that Illinois was going to be, we did the same thing in Illinois. Missouri, same thing in Missouri. That’s the strategy. I call it a proportionate strategy.”

Some call it a risky approach.

“Could an unorthodox strategy work?” asked Dante Scala, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. “It certainly is an unorthodox year. But can Giuliani really go for almost an entire month without winning anywhere, with virtually no momentum going into Florida?”

The Giuliani campaign thinks so. Mr. Giuliani’s campaign manager, Mike DuHaime, said this fall that Mr. Giuliani was “momentum-proof.”

Now the strategy is being put to the test. Mr. Giuliani recently made a concerted effort to get back into the mix in the early states with a heavy advertising campaign in New Hampshire, but scaled back the effort when it failed to lift his standing in the polls. So the Giuliani campaign is redoubling his efforts in places like Missouri and Florida, at a time when his lead in national polls has been slipping.

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It might be called investing time where you have the best chance of getting a reward. It certainly is risky and counterintuitive. Past races have out a premium on momentum coming out of the early states. It should be added, though, that Bill Clinton lost in Iowa and came in second in New Hampshire and claimed that as a comeback. Rudy appears to be counting on roughing up his opponent's bull pen.