Rivals Clinton and Giuliani feeling the heat

by Glenn Thrush and Craig Gordon of Newsday

MASON CITY, Iowa - The woman, whose parka was plastered with "Hillary" stickers, was chanting the candidate's name, trying to pacify 300 grumbling Iowans tired of waiting for Hillary Rodham Clinton to arrive here last week.

The woman kept it going for 15 minutes but finally collapsed into a steel folding chair. "The Clinton people should have provided food for everybody," she said to a friend. "If we gave 'em food, maybe they'd all vote for Hillary."

Hillary Rodham Clinton's fate may not hinge on free chicken-salad sandwiches, but even the senator's inner circle now concedes the woman's basic point: that Clinton's margin for error has disappeared in the last two weeks.

Clinton is still the front-runner, but she's sputtering in national and state polls - a dilemma now shared by her nemesis, Rudy Giuliani, on the Republican side, who is trying to withstand a surge by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

And that has observers wondering if the front-running New Yorkers are experiencing potentially fatal reversals of fortune - or just some last-minute buyer's remorse from the party faithful.

See the rest of the story today in Newsday:

Clinton and Giuliani clearly enjoyed an early edge because of their fame - not many presidential candidates get the one-name celebrity treatment like Hillary and Rudy. But they are paying for it now, as primary voters finally get around to assessing available alternatives, especially shock-of-the-new candidates like Barack Obama and Huckabee.

"It's just sort of a natural process that some front-runners survive - and some don't," said Duke University politics professor David Rohde.

"People who are the most visible, the best known, have a tremendous advantage" at the start, he said. "Then, as public attention begins to grow, and as coverage of the less well known actors expands, people begin to learn about them, realize they have real choices and sometimes choose the others."

Party insiders see the dangers ahead for both Clinton and Giuliani. "This is not a death spiral by any means, but her people are smart to be nervous," said Matt Bennett, a longtime Democratic operative who was Wesley Clark's communications director four years ago. "I think people are starting to focus for the first time. I also think Democrats are really asking themselves, 'Do we want someone familiar or a fresh face?'"

Barry Wynn, a top Giuliani supporter in South Carolina, says the former mayor's fame can only take him so far.

"Notoriety is nice, but it's not a magnet that holds everybody in place, because someone else can come along and become famous," he said. "Some of Rudy's vote was there because of notoriety; we all know that he's a star. Well, [Mitt] Romney has become a star ... and then Huckabee's become a star."

Giuliani, who loves to play by his own set of political rules (his favorite quote: "Sacred cows make the best hamburger meat") could very well lose three early primary races - New Hampshire, South Carolina and Iowa, where a new poll has him at a rock-bottom 5 percent. He hopes to rebound in Florida Jan. 29, then run the table at the Feb. 5 mega-primary, banking on huge leads in big, moderate states like New York, California and New Jersey.

"I think he might be able to lose one of them or two of them," says Rohde. "But if he loses a whole string of these, as seems to be a plausible turn of events, and the first domino falls, it's possible that'll lead to all the dominoes falling. ... I doubt very much there's time to recover."

Stu Rothenberg, an independent political analyst who has followed national races for two decades, disagrees. "Rudy's strategy is really stupid, but it might work," he said. "The Republican field is both strong and weak at the same time - everyone has a big hole, and that still gives Rudy's scenario substantial credibility."

Hillary Clinton is also counting on a Feb. 5 big-state firewall, but unlike Giuliani, she won't have the excuse that she didn't try as hard in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Even if she lost Iowa, her aides long believed that her strong organization in New Hampshire would compensate. But they've become less sure of that in recent days as her once consistently double-digit lead has fallen to single digits - plummeting to a mere 3 points in a Mason-Dixon poll released yesterday.

"New Hampshire ain't what it used to be," one Clinton supporter said in Iowa last week.

One thing that could swing momentum back in favor of the New Yorkers, Barry Wynn argues, is when voters remember the stakes of picking the next president. Wynn thinks better headlines out of Iraq, Iran and Pakistan are hurting both Giuliani and Clinton, their parties' top choices on national security.

"When [voters] see peace in Pakistan and peace in Iraq, this makes everybody warm and fuzzy - 'So why do we need somebody tough and serious?'" said Wynn.