Not every presidential nominee in the modern era has won both Iowa and New Hampshire. But they have all received a boost from at least one of them.

And therein lies Hillary Clinton's predicament: If she loses to Barack Obama on Tuesday night, she will have suffered back-to-back defeats in the lead-off states, both in raw numbers and in terms of media perception. Never, in either party, has a candidate endured such a fate and gone on to claim the nomination. And never has a candidate won both events—as Obama is poised to do—and been denied the nomination.

The same history applies to the Republican side, underscoring the do-or-die stakes of the John McCain-Mitt Romney contest in New Hampshire: the loser will have suffered clear losses in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Only one of them figures to emerge with the viability to challenge Mike Huckabee, Iowa's winner. And history doesn't smile at all on the waiting-game strategy being employed by both Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson.  read more »

Yesterday's Times report from Iowa was produced to an Allman Brothers soundtrack.  read more »

The Clinton campaign is playing up the idea that the results of Iowa have historically been an aberration.

"Well, you know Iowa does not have the best track record in determining who the party's nominee is," Hillary said earlier today. "Everybody knows that."

Except she's wrong.  read more »

An early dispatch from Very Special Correspondent Choire Sicha in New Hampshire.

Bill Clinton is pre-emptively downplaying the significance of any poor showing by his wife tonight and next week in New Hampshire, reminding everyone that he didn't win a primary until Georgia in 1992.

It's not an ideal analogy, though.

It is true that Clinton's first '92 win was in Georgia and that the state didn't vote until March 3. But it's important to remember two points:  read more »

Sometime on Thursday night, at least one Democrat and Republican will be declared “winners” of the Iowa caucuses. These candidates may or may not have received the most votes; the declaration will be a subjective judgment by the media.

And no matter what New Hampshire’s proudly independent voters say, history shows that this verdict will spill over into the first primary state, which will vote on January 8. Iowa’s results—or more precisely, the media’s interpretation of them—alters, sometimes profoundly, the New Hampshire electorate’s perception of the presidential field.

Every Iowa “winner” gets some kind of a boost in New Hampshire. But the type of boost varies dramatically, from staggering to inconsequential. The variable is the degree to which the Iowa outcome represents a surprise: the more the media is caught off-guard by the results, the more the media will hype those results and, thus, the bigger the bounce will be.

How will Iowa re-shape the ’08 race? For some guidance, here’s a look back at the media’s interpretation of past Iowa results and how it has spilled over into New Hampshire.  read more »

While Hillary Clinton delivered her closing argument to voters in Cedar Rapids, I asked Representative Anthony Weiner, who is out here campaigning for her, what he thought about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s criticisms of the presidential candidates today.

“If he thinks there is a vacuum for good ideas, I don’t think he has looked at the candidates carefully, including his own senator,” said Weiner, who is all but certainly running to succeed Bloomberg as mayor. When I asked him if he thought Bloomberg would run for president, he suggested the mayor would be shirking his current responsibilities if he did so: “Hillary will be our nominee and then we’ll see. If the mayor wants to run, that’s fine, some of us are focused on the candidate we support, and the future of the city.”

More after the jump.  read more »

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa--A semi-hoarse Barack Obama told a sizeable crowd in this western Iowa town Tuesday night, "Washington is in its last throes, as my cousin Cheney would say."

It was a notably pointed remark from Mr. Obama, who often gets more gently humorous mileage out of his distant shared heritage with the vice-president. But it played into the Illinois senator's broader closing argument in Iowa that he, rather than Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, is best placed to deliver change.  read more »

On Saturday night, after a quick misstep into a place called Scooters (fog machine, dance floor grinding) during a search for a TV showing the Giants-Patriots game, I found the bar of the Hotel Ottumwa, where the owner, Tim Schwartz, had also just returned from a Barack Obama event at the local high school.

“I could support him,” Schwartz told me, as he tossed some cocktail napkins on the bar. “He’s a dynamic speaker and he brings up some issues, but I’m probably going to caucus for Hillary.”  read more »

Hillary Clinton was on her game all day Sunday, hitting all the right notes, drawing huge ovations from voters, getting people to commit their support on caucus cards.

And yet, thanks to two of her surrogates, it ended up being a rough press day.

After Clinton finished her last event in Cedar Falls, the BlackBerries of reporters buzzed with an e-mail from the Obama campaign alerting them to the remarks of Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, who disparaged Iowa in a Columbia Dispatch story leading the Drudge Report.  read more »