Politico – How much does Iowa matter?

POLITICO – The end of the caucuses?

Former Iowa House Speaker Christopher Rants, who backed Romney in 2008, worries about — or pre-emptively devalues — the Iowa caucuses:

[If] if you are Haley Barbour, a Mitch Daniels, a Mitt Romney, you have to ask yourself if there is a path to victory in a state like Iowa. There is no room to the right of Palin or Huckabee. And if they both run you can expect that it becomes a game of one upsmanship in terms of rhetoric. That makes winning elsewhere almost impossible. After all, previous Iowa winners like Huckabee and Robertson both fizzled out after Iowa.

Politico
1/24/11