Campaign Diary: Christmas At Crunch Time

This campaign diary is written by Andrew Kirtzman, a veteran correspondent for WCBS-TV in New York City. Kirtzman is the author of "Rudy Giuliani: Emperor Of The City," an account of the former mayor's stormy tenure as the Big Apple's chief executive. He will be writing regularly on the presidential campaign for CBSNews.com.

No figure in this campaign has been as unreadable as the corporate candidate with the flawless smile. Driving west towards the Sheraton in West Des Moines, I'm having visions of spending down time with Romney in a casual setting, sharing jokes from the campaign trail over some chili or bread pudding. Maybe tonight he'll drop his guard.

It's isn't easy fighting for political survival in the season of peace. The holiday has the candidates shrouding their commercials as Christmas greetings and re-branding their campaign events as Christmas parties. It's a ridiculous task to appear non-political two weeks before the caucuses. Yet the prospect of seeing Romney chilling tonight has me curious.

I enter the hotel and walk into a ballroom packed with more than 1,000 people. They're sitting at their tables in total silence as Romney stands in front of the room, delivering a speech in a crisp blue suit. He's speaking in front of a Christmas tree, which is the only bow to the holiday theme I can detect.

"This is a time for calling upon the goodness of America and the strength of America."

The sound of platitudes fills the air.

"My campaign is about strengthening America. Our jobs. Our military. Our values. Our families."

The audience gives him a nice ovation, but starts filing out the moment the speech ends. Some party.

I push my way to the front of the room and stick my tape recorder between Romney and a stream of well-wishers seeking a moment of his time. It's a fruitless search for some spontaneity. Romney is polite and smiley, but makes no attempt to connect with the people shaking his hand. Each gets a short, innocuous comment and perhaps a photo with him. The scene has all the spontaneity of a Swiss watch.

I wonder how many other reporters through the years have had moments similar to the one I had driving here tonight, eagerly hoping to catch a rare intimate view of this impenetrable figure. Some may have succeeded, for all I know. But there'll be no warm and fuzzy Mitt Romney moment tonight.

The Star Bar

The schedules for candidate Christmas parties keep popping up in my email box, and the concept continues to intrigue me. Twenty-four hours after the Romney event, I am headed out to another party in yet another search for a Genuine Moment.

A dense fog has settled over Iowa this evening, giving the desolate streets of Des Moines a Jack-the-Ripper-in-London quality. Only the headlights of oncoming cars and the Christmas lights along Grand Avenue pierce the view as I drive toward my destination.

I am headed to see Christopher Dodd, a man at the opposite end of the political food chain.

The lights outside the Star Bar start to shine through the mist. Music spills out of its doors - loud, bad rock music, the kind they play at bars serving chicken wings and egg rolls.

Dodd is doing so badly in the Democratic race that Real Clear Politics omits him from its poll results altogether. The latest CNN survey has him at one percent. This, for a person so serious about his run that he moved his family here.

Yet the scene inside is far from tragic. Dodd has packed the back half of this sprawling place, and his supporters are listening intently to his speech, ignoring the blaring music in the room. You can choose to listen to Bob Marley singing "No Woman, No Cry," or you can hear Chris Dodd talking about the Family and Medical Leave Act.

"It's a serious time for the world. The United States needs to get back to its feet at home and lead with moral authority around the globe again."

He speaks in the declarative style of another era. There's no John Edwards-style softness to his voice - it's more like Lowell Thomas narrating a newsreel.

He's decrying President Bush's disregard for the Constitution, the threat to civil rights. Mostly, he's doing a riff about his experience.

"I'm proud to have written the Family and Medical Leave Act….the first child care legislation…. the only Democratic candidate to have worn the uniform of our country…."

The big mystery of Dodd's campaign is why he entered this race in the first place. The competition was packed with mega-voltage political stars, he didn't have any breakthrough policy proposals and his major calling card was his senatorial experience. Not surprisingly, the world failed to take notice.

"I still believe that people look at electability and experience," he tells me, hopefully, before laying out a fairly dubious scenario for victory.

His wife, Jackie, complains that the race turned into an "American Idol" contest, a celebrity shoot-out. "It should have been a contest of ideas," she says.

"On many of the issues, he proposed the plan and many candidates were just stealing wide swaths of it. In some cases they didn't even change the verbs."

But didn't she suspect it might turn out this way? She doesn't really say.

She does concede that his decision to run surprised her. When Dodd told her he had something to talk about two years ago, she thought he was going to ask her to have another child. "When he told me he wanted to run for president I was relieved," she says with a laugh.

"If we had a baby it would have been weaned by now," she adds. "It would have been a shorter commitment."

There's not much left to say when you're in such desperate shape this late in the game. I ask the senator, who's never lost a race, what it's like to campaign these days.

"These young people out in these little towns around Iowa - they're looking at their candidate, you know, barely breaking through, competing with the margin of error," he says. "And yet they get up every morning committed to fighting hard. If that doesn't get me up in the morning I don't know what else would."

The people in this room are taking him seriously. A clutch of admirers rushes him for his autograph.

"He's self deprecating, he makes fun of his gray hair, I like what he has to say," says a salesman named Mark Connolly. But he's a realist. "It gets down to us being two weeks from the caucuses, and it gets to point of hoping you hitch your wagon to someone who has a chance."

Two hours later, the crowd has thinned out, but Dodd is still here, flitting around and chatting with the remaining guests. He's in no rush to go home.