I have all the candidates’ public schedules loaded into my Google Calendar. Take a look at Fred’s schedule in the last week:
Lazy Fred is no more. The dude’s had 5 events in Iowa each day the last week. Some of those events were canceled because of a blizzard today, others received less than rave reviews, but you can’t argue that Fred is confounding the pundits with a bruising schedule when it matters most. That kind of thing counts in Iowa, and as a result of that and the inevitable Huckaslide, I’m predicting he places a surprisingly strong third and stays in the race.
What about the other candidates? Not all of them post their schedules online (or have them published by the New York Times which makes them available in iCal format), so it’s impossible to do a full comparison. But the max has been 3-4 events per day, with Hillary Clinton seeming to keep the next busiest (publicly viewable) schedule.
And most of the other candidates are dividing their time between two or more early states, diluting the Iowa impact. For instance, consistent with his diehard focus on the later states, Rudy Giuliani will be in Florida next Wednesday.
Memo to the campaigns: yet another benefit of posting all your public events in Web 2.0-friendly formats is the chance that some obscure blogger might stumble upon it and use the information to take a second look at your candidacy just 12 days out from Iowa.