Momentum and compression shape next 33 days

Washington Post:

When George W. Bush stumbled here in his quest for the presidency in 2000, he had 18 days to recover before the next major primary. But the erstwhile front-runners humbled in Iowa this week emerged with just five days to get back on their feet, slow down their rivals and salvage their campaigns.

For all the discussion about how early this year's presidential primary season started, the more profound change in the political calendar is how compressed it has become. Starting with the Iowa caucuses, 31 states will vote over 33 days for the nominee of one or both parties, compared with just nine states that voted in the equivalent period eight years ago.

The furious pace of contests this year will be so intense that it could make momentum king and increase the challenge exponentially for Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Mitt Romney as they try to shrug off defeats in Iowa and regroup for New Hampshire's primary on Tuesday. That proves a bitter irony for both camps, which had built their strategies around the assumption that they would exploit the compressed schedule to roll over other candidates before anyone had a chance to catch up.

"This is a faster track than ever before," said Scott Reed, a political strategist who ran Republican Robert J. Dole's presidential campaign in 1996 and had the luxury of a couple of weeks to revive it after it faltered early in New Hampshire. "It leaves very little margin for error if you're a front-runner. It's tougher to lose two nights in a row and think you can carry on."

As the campaigns rolled into New Hampshire early Friday morning, they had only hours to absorb the Iowa caucus results, decide whether (or how) to retool their strategies and set last-minute television advertising. The campaign window is so abbreviated that it was already too late to commission new mailings and to count on getting them into voters' hands before they go to the polls.

The campaigns will have to rely on the organizations they long ago built here and in other early-primary states to carry them through despite an early loss -- or even losses -- and enable them to compete when more than 20 states vote Feb. 5. "It's going to go so fast from start to finish," said Terence R. McAuliffe, Clinton's campaign chairman. "Once we get through the early states . . . I think we're going to go with tremendous momentum into the February 5 states."

The Iowa losers are also counting on New Hampshire's contrarian streak; it has frequently chosen a different favorite than its Midwestern cousin. But the usual eight days between the contests has now been cut nearly in half, leaving little time for the victors' media bounce to fade. Once a sense of momentum builds around a campaign, strategists said, it becomes awfully hard to turn things around in a short time frame.

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The compressed schedule also leaves little time for exploiting the victories in Iowa by raising money and getting people in place to campaign for you in the early states. That is why the Giuliani strategy is not looking that bad at this point. Winning is about picking your battles and not committing resources to battles that you can't win or the cost of which will keep you from winning later battles. Giuliani has invested in state with the bigger prize in delegates, if not in the momentum sweepstakes.

It is unlikely that Huckabee has enough time and resources to exploit his Iowa win in New Hampshire. He may in South Carolina. He also needs to quickly raise a lot of money to compete in Florida and the large north eastern states. Will the compressed schedule give him that time? Can John McCain raise enough money coming out of New Hampshire to be competitive in Florida and New York. Time will be short, and momentum may not be enough to carry the day.

Obama seems to have the funding to carry his momentum. the question maybe whether he will still have momentum coming out of New Hampshire.