Same destination, different paths in pursuit of Iowa

CLINTON, Iowa - Campaigning this week in a state he badly wants to win, Mitt Romney talked about how difficult it was for him to raise big, green stalks of corn when, at 15, he worked for the summer on his uncle's ranch in a parched corner of Idaho. At the end of the summer, he took a train through Iowa and was astounded.

"I saw tall corn and black earth and I saw the water fall from the sky, instead of the irrigation ditch," Romney said to a crowd with more than a few farmers. "And I said, 'Wow, God must sure love Iowa.' "

If Rudy Giuliani ever grew corn, he never mentioned it on his swing through Iowa this week. He barely mentioned Iowa. Greeting voters in Muscatine, he recounted his days prosecuting Mafia figures in New York and Italy.

As Romney and Giuliani battle for votes leading up to the Jan. 3 Republican caucus in Iowa - the first contest of the nomination race - they routinely emphasize their differences on fiscal policy and national security and their credentials. But they are also confronting differences between their lives in the Northeast and those of Iowa's voters, and coming up with different ways to respond.

Romney missed few chances to identify with Midwestern life; he talked about "heartland values," how much he likes his wife's meatloaf cakes with ketchup and cinnamon sauce, his son Josh's trip through all 99 Iowa counties in a Winnebago, and his admiration for the Hawkeye State's long history of championship wrestlers.

"What is it about wrestling in this state?" the former Massachusetts governor marveled. "You've got great wrestlers in Iowa."

Giuliani, the fast-talking, Brooklyn-born former New York mayor, took a different tack, introducing himself without any mention of Iowa. He could have been in Manhattan. Walking onto a stage at Muscatine Community College, he simply pulled an index card from his breast pocket and said, "These are my 12 commitments to the American people."

"If you agree with these positions, I'd ask you to support me. If you don't agree with those positions, I'd ask you to support someone else. Because we're going to do it. We're going to accomplish this."

The different approaches carry risks and rewards for the candidates, who want to connect with Iowa's voters without appearing falsely intimate or cold and aloof.

"The voters here like personal connections. They like to see you, to see how you answer questions, how you connect with a crowd," said Kevin Leicht, a professor of political sociology at the University of Iowa. "You don't have to go out of your way to come across as one of them to do that, and I think to some extent Giuliani and Romney have different takes about how to do that, and are clearly playing to their strengths."

Romney, a multimillionaire investor, used the corn-farming story to introduce himself and show some comfort with agricultural techniques.

"It was hard raising corn in this part of Idaho, because to get the moisture you needed, you had to irrigate the ditch, you had to spray the corn all the time to keep the weeds down, and you had to always be cultivating the dirt in the stabilizing roots," Romney said.

Voters in Clinton and Davenport listened intently, then laughed when Romney contrasted his meager corn crop with the bounteous corn he saw in Iowa.

In Muscatine, Giuliani mentioned Iowa only once, in closing, when he compared its voters with New York voters.

"Iowa is a wonderful place to me, because everybody in Iowa is a political science PhD. Do you know that?" he said to laughter. "I've been in towns, I think the population is about 30 people, and they want to know how am I going to index the AMT [the alternative minimum tax] in order to prevent it spreading out to more than 4 million people. I mean, I don't get these kinds of questions in New York."

Romney is leading in most polls in Iowa, where he has invested more money and time there than any of his rivals, with Giuliani running second to fourth, depending on the survey.

"I've gotten to know a good part of Iowa," Romney said in Clinton, "and I just want to say how much I appreciate the values that you have and the love you have for the country."

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.