Political history a warning for early-season winners

Tony Muenster (left), Bernard Michel, and Don Sieverding had closet seats yesterday during a crowded Democratic caucus. (Mark Hirsch/Associated Press)

DES MOINES - Now comes the hard part for Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, the insurgents who last night took center stage in their parties' presidential races, but who will now face the daunting scrutiny of the political and media world, with many of their own parties' leaders arrayed against them.

The triumphs of Obama, a freshman senator who four years ago was serving in the Illinois legislature, and Huckabee, the little-known former governor of Arkansas, were dazzling and even historic in their own ways: Each struck a rich vein of anti-Washington feeling in Iowa and withstood strong challenges from far more famous opponents. Obama scored the double victory of defeating a rival anti-establishment candidate, former senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Democrats saw Obama, whose mixed-race background makes him a symbol of change in Washington and of a new era of understanding in the world, as the strongest possible corrective to President Bush's often abrasive foreign policy. Hillary Clinton, the favorite of the Democratic establishment, was flayed by Obama for being too close to Bush in supporting military action in Iraq and assessing the Iran threat.

Iowa Republicans, too, chose a candidate who called Bush's foreign policy "arrogant" but for the most part eschewed the harsh rhetoric of his party's better-known candidates.

However, recent history hasn't been kind to candidates who won early caucuses and primaries, with all of them faltering in later states. Obama and Huckabee now join Democrats Gary Hart (1984) and Paul Tsongas (1992), and Republicans George H.W. Bush (1980), Bob Dole (1988), Pat Buchanan (1996), and John McCain (2000), who each marshaled time-for-a-change anger to win a hotly contested race in Iowa or New Hampshire, only to fall to the favorite of their party's establishment.

Obama and Huckabee may be in better shape than any of those candidates, but the experiences of past insurgents suggest that Obama and Huckabee still have many challenges ahead of them.

Unlike Tsongas and Hart, who struggled against better-financed opponents, Obama has the money to match or exceed both Clinton and Edwards. But he also shares some qualities with Tsongas and Hart, whose efforts to remake their parties were portrayed by their opponents as high-handed (Tsongas) or superficial (Hart).

Obama, who can be inspirational on the stump but also lapses into occasional John Kerry-like locution, can expect to face both charges.

Like Obama this year, Hart in 1984 called for generational change and cast the establishment favorite, former vice president Walter Mondale, as too wedded to the old ways of Washington. Where Obama promised a "new politics," Hart offered "new ideas." After Hart surged to a surprising second in the Iowa caucuses and followed up with a big win in the New Hampshire primary, Mondale was written off by some pundits.

But he turned his campaign around by openly ridiculing Hart's "new ideas" and adopting the burger-chain refrain of "Where's the beef?"

Voters began to view Hart as lacking substance, and Mondale prevailed in a close fight for the nomination. Likewise, Tsongas, after defeating Bill Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, faltered after Clinton portrayed the cerebral Tsongas as acting superior to others, putting him out of touch with the very voters he was trying to reach.

In this election, Hillary Clinton is the establishment favorite, and she repeatedly contrasted her 16 years on the national stage with Obama's relatively light experience. Her implicit message was that she is fully vetted and therefore won't wilt under Republican attacks, like many past Democratic nominees; Obama, by contrast, is a potentially ripe target for GOP attack-mongers.

But Clinton stopped short of making this charge explicit, and even repudiated her New Hampshire chairman, Bill Shaheen, for drawing attention to Obama's admission of youthful experimentation with drugs. In the end, Clinton's emphasis on experience cast her as the candidate of Washington, a creature of her resume. In New Hampshire, where Clinton has a stronger base of support than in Iowa, she will almost certainly make the point about Obama's vulnerabilities clearer; she'll also escalate her criticism of his "new politics" as a campaign slogan rather than a valid blueprint for change.

"Clinton is not going to fold like a cheap deck chair," said Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political science professor. "There'll be a significant competition on the Democratic side."

Obama, however, has some key factors on his side in New Hampshire. Edwards, who took a large portion of the anti-Washington vote in Iowa, is less popular in New Hampshire. In addition, New Hampshire Democrats include a large portion of voters opposed to the Iraq War who helped their party's candidates prevail for numerous state offices in 2006.

For Huckabee, who lacks the campaign funds of Obama, the battle in New Hampshire and beyond is even more challenging. The GOP has never in recent history chosen a presidential nominee with a national profile as low as Huckabee's; in recent Republican contests, the establishment favorite has always prevailed.

And the establishment is clearly arrayed against Huckabee, whose past support of tax increases and criticism of Bush's foreign policy have made him anathema to economic- and defense-oriented conservatives.

Luckily for Huckabee, the GOP establishment is more split than usual this election, with insiders backing both former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Senator John McCain of Arizona. In New Hampshire, McCain and Romney will square off against each other, with Huckabee expected to place no better than third. Wounded by his distant second-place finish in Iowa, where he invested time and resources, Romney will be fighting for his political life in the Granite State.

Quite possibly, only one of the establishment favorites will survive to compete against Huckabee in Michigan, on Jan. 15, and South Carolina, on Jan. 19.

If Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, can't win in South Carolina, with its large evangelical population, his Iowa win will look like an odd footnote to the rise of another candidate as the new GOP nominee.