The Battle for Iowa

Iowa is not like other states. There's fuck-all to do here, and unless you just love dirt or barnyard sex, you could easily die of boredom — except in an election year, when suddenly you become the center of the universe. Iowa political events sometimes seem like meetings of Athenian elders; every last audience member seems to have read the text of the Military Commissions Act, and even the best-prepared candidates come out of town-hall meetings looking harried and tested. And these days, the candidate who looks the worst for wear in Iowa is Hillary Clinton.

Here's how bad it's gotten for Hillary of late: Rival candidates are literally tripping over each other in an effort to knock her wobbling campaign off its pedestal. For the first time since this race began, three major candidates are in a three-way tie at the top of the Iowa polls. A primary season that looked like a prolonged slam-dunk coronation a month ago has morphed into a scene from the Spike TV classic Predator, with her seven pursuers fingering the green blood on the ground and whispering with a weary smile about the once-invincible monster:

If it bleeds, we can kill it.

It's Wednesday afternoon in a public library in Monticello, Iowa, a windy little two-saloon town south of Dubuque, and the foxily dressed Michelle Obama ("Jimmy Choos," she says, pointing to her sleek brown boots; they stand out like a set of Ferrari headlights in this room full of bundled-up farm-town housewives) is about to read a story to a bunch of local kiddies. What elevates the event beyond the standard issue campaign-wife-with-kids schtick is what's happening downstairs, on the floor of the library directly below Obama: There, a crowd of clean-cut twenty-somethings almost identical in appearance to the Obama team is setting up a meeting room for a campaign appearance by John Edwards. The way it's being arranged, Edwards will be exactly underneath Michelle Obama when he takes the mike. Only in the stretch run before the all-important Iowa caucus can two presidential campaigns land on the exact same geographical pinpoint on the vast planet Earth at exactly the same moment, entirely by accident. The whole state is like a supercharged game of political Battleship.

"It's crazy," says Newsweek's Holly Bailey, who is seated next to me at the Edwards deal. "I show up here to follow Edwards, go upstairs to charge up my computer. Next thing you know, I'm staring at Michelle Obama."

Not only are the Democratic hopefuls crawling all over Iowa, nearly all of them are pimping the same message. In the wake of a nearly catastrophic two-week run in the Hillary Clinton campaign — a period that saw the stone-faced former first lady rocked by a series of spastic missteps just shy of "Dean Scream" magnitude — the campaigns of John Edwards, Barack Obama and the other Democrats are each attacking a different recently exposed flank of the Hillary Express.

You can clearly see that dynamic at work in the Monticello logjam. Upstairs, in her thirteenth visit to this state, Michelle Obama is playing the same game her husband has been playing of late — hammering Hillary without mentioning her by name. She refers pointedly to politicians who voted to support Bush's invasion of Iraq: "There were a lot of people with a lot of experience," she says, "who marched right behind that drum."

The reference isn't lost on anyone. "Yeah, I caught that," says Molly Pisarik, an Iowa voter sitting in the audience. "Obviously she's talking about Hillary."