Iowa Thunderdome: Obama/Huckabee Edition

If you're in the market for a presidential caucus that will be in flux right down to the wire, Iowa is looking to be right up your alley.

How I feel about national polls is well known — in presidential contests, I'm not convinced they are an accurate indicator of anything other than name ID. But polls on the ground in a primary state do indicate something, even if only trend lines, and the conventional wisdom about Iowa has been upset several times over the last few weeks by polls indicating that two candidates in particular (Obama and Huckabee) are ascendant where things had been stable for a while.

Mind you, this is not to indicate that suddenly Obama has a 20 point lead or that Huckabee is running away with the store. The real story is not where the candidates are — the race is still very tight on both sides. Rather, the story is about where the candidates were. Obama spent a great deal of time in the muddy top tier of the Iowa Democratic race, where John Edwards and Hillary Clinton joined the senator from Illinois in a grouping so close they were often not distinguishable from one another in a statistically significant way. Clinton has been on top of that grouping, but only just. Obama, then, has sort of crawled his way to that top spot, at least in one poll, and seems like his star is on the rise.

Conversely, Huckabee has rocketed from obscurity to start wailing on his Republican opponents in Iowa. The only serious Republican in Iowa was supposed to be Romney, who was burning through money on organization and outreach in Iowa. The other top players in the GOP field — Giuliani, John McCain, and Fred Thompson — had all more or less decided to skip Iowa, perhaps not wishing to thrash each other in competition for a large bloc of evangelical voters.

Perhaps Huckabee's message is just working in Iowa, or perhaps he saw the possibility of drawing a sharp distinction among those evangelical voters by default, as he is one of them and Mitt Romney is not. Either way, Huckabee has caught up to Romney and is now either tied or slightly ahead of him, depending on who you ask.

These are not the last major fluctuations we will see in the Iowa caucuses, and I feel confident in saying that there will be fluctuations for everyone near the top right up until caucus day, on which things will happen and deals will be made inside each caucus that will have a stronger effect on determining the outcome than anything that's come before. Some of those deals might be totally unforeseeable.

It will be fun to watch, but it won't be fun to try and predict what will happen, because at this point the possibilities are numerous. Stay tuned.