Should Romney go for broke in Iowa?

Which brings us to the second problem: Perry. Although the Texas governor has seen his poll numbers plummet in Iowa—from a high of 29 percent in early September to a low of 6 percent in October—as he has elsewhere, Perry’s heartfelt and hard-core Evangelical convictions and his tea-party bona fides, combined with his campaign’s capacity to mount a full-bore organizing blitz on the ground and drop a metric ton of negative TV ads from the air, make him a significant threat to rebound in the state. And indeed, at the Faith & Freedom dinner, Perry clearly signaled his intent to play hard for the affections of the religious right. Taking swipes first at Romney, who in an earlier incarnation supported abortion rights, and then at Cain, Perry thundered, to loud applause, “Being pro-life is not a matter of campaign convenience; it is a core conviction … It is a liberal canard to say ‘I am personally pro-life; but government should stay out of that decision.’ If that is your view, you are not pro-life, you are pro-having-your-cake-­and­-eating-it too.”

Then there is the third problem, which revolves around the metanarrative of the campaign. If Romney decides to go all-in in Iowa, the national story line will shift in a direction that the candidate and his team have successfully kept it from doing all year—making the caucuses, instead of New Hampshire, the first test of his strength, and making central the question of whether Romney can slay the demons of 2008. “Iowa will become all about Mitt the minute he gets in it,” says a Republican operative unaligned with any campaign. “This will tell us whether Mitt Romney has really matured. If he’s grown up into a guy who could be president, he won’t do it. I think Iowa is Lucy and the football for him.”

A number of Romney’s senior advisers are broadly sympathetic to this view. But others are increasingly tempted to take the plunge. Below the radar, Romney’s people in Iowa have labored long and mightily to maintain the network of activists and volunteers who were behind the governor in the last go-round. And with each passing day that the field remains fragmented and Perry remains unable to revivify himself, the lure of Iowa only grows for those in Romney’s Boston brain trust.