THE NOTE: Great Expectations

Dec. 30, 2007 -- DES MOINES, Iowa --

A lucky seven vital, hugely important questions to mull on a brilliant Sunday in Iowa, as you mourn for the 1972 Dolphins:

1. Do Mike Huckabee's Iowa minions care that Holiday Inn Expresses don't carry maps of Pakistan in their lobbies? (Probably not, but you never know.)

2. Does Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton feel left out with all these guys fighting each other now? (Not likely -- but Bill Clinton might.)

3. Does a man who has made as much money as Mayor Michael Bloomberg understand timing? (Most certainly yes.)

4. Who is less a part of the GOP conversation five days before Iowa -- former mayor Rudolph Giuliani or the man Rudy thinks did a good job playing him on TV? (The tie goes to the former front-runner -- even Fred Thompson doesn't feel the need to declare himself relevant.)

5. Will two battles in two states against two different candidates ruffle Mitt Romney's hair? (Getting warmer.)

6. Does the New England Patriots' perfection carry metaphorical political meaning? (No, but here's a stab: Their squeaker over Eli's feisty Giants means no one is immune from a scare, and even a flawless regular season means zilch when the playoffs start.)

7. Will third place matter for the Republicans? (Perhaps.) For the Democrats? (Not so much, but -- oddly -- fourth place could matter more.)

Clinton has something to say on that matter, and here's her humble assessment/political handicapping/outrageous spin: Asked whether her campaign can survive a third-place Iowa finish, she told ABC's George Stephanopoulos yes: "I think, because it's so close -- you know, when I started here, I was in single digits. I mean, nobody expected me to be doing as well as I'm doing in Iowa," said Clinton, D-N.Y., in an interview airing Sunday morning on "This Week." (Really -- nobody?)

"I was running against one opponent who has been campaigning here for four years, another opponent from a neighboring state. So, I believe that this campaign will be bunched up," she continued. "I think that the history out of Iowa is that a lot of people live to fight another day."

Stephanopoulos: "So, you may not win."

Clinton: "I'm not expecting anything."

That's well and good, but we are. And while she also says in the interview that her husband won't be invited to National Security Council meetings, President Clinton was expecting the unexpected on her behalf Saturday in New Hampshire.

If this is a closing argument, it's appropriately frosty for Iowa and New Hampshire. "You have to have a leader who is strong and commanding and convincing enough . . . to deal with the unexpected," he said, in what The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut and Alec MacGillis see as a "stark" delivery of his wife's "central campaign message." "There is a better than 50 percent chance that sometime in the first year or 18 months of the next presidency, something will happen that is not being discussed in this campaign. President Bush never talked about Osama bin Laden and didn't foresee Hurricane Katrina."

The big picture for the Democrats: "In a time of discontent -- amid war, high gas prices and a miserable housing market -- the buzzword of the political season has been change. But what that amounts to, and who can best deliver it, is the subject of fierce dispute, particularly on the Democratic side," Mark Z. Barabak and Michael Finnegan write in the Los Angeles Times.

But how about this change: Four days before Iowa, the Democrats' pitched battle features Clinton as an observer (mostly). It's Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and former senator John Edwards, D-N.C., battling for the same voters -- each others' for sure, but also the soft Clinton supporters who can still be convinced to start dreaming or start steaming.

Edwards -- readying a caucus-eve 36-hour (!) exercise in sleep-deprivation -- stepped up the rhetorical fight on Saturday: No lobbyists in his White House, period. "This is a continuation of my belief that we need to reduce the influence of these special interests and lobbyists, which I've believed my entire time in public life," Edwards said, per the Des Moines Register's Tony Leys.

That's a tweak at Obama, who doesn't quite make the same commitment -- though he once did. ABC's Jake Tapper writes of Obama's new ad: "The campaign notably excised from the excerpt one mid-sentence clause in which Obama promised to ban lobbyists from working in his White House -- a pledge the Illinois Democrat seemed to have backed off from earlier this month. . . . Sensing an opportunity to differentiate himself from Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and in particular from Obama, with whom he is competing for Iowa caucus-goers, Edwards called a press conference in which he made the pledge Obama seemed to have backed away from."

Obama is engaging Edwards, blasting him over spending by outside groups, and the big kahuna of electability: "Part of the problem John would have in the general election is that you know, the issues that he's taking out now are not the issues or the things that he said four years ago. Which always causes us problems in general elections," Obama said, per ABC's Sunlen Miller.