Here’s a paragraph on Iowa from Bill Kristol’s Time column:

The primary schedule will be newly front-loaded and compressed. Will that make Iowa and New Hampshire more or less important? No one is certain. I suspect that the slingshot effect out of Iowa and New Hampshire could be greater than ever. In fact, in recent years Iowa has become an increasingly good predictor of the nominee: Bob Dole and Bush won Iowa in 1996 and 2000, respectively, and went on to win the GOP nomination; Al Gore and John Kerry won Iowa in 2000 and 2004 and prevailed on the Democratic side. But in a multicandidate field in Iowa, which it looks as if we’ll have for both parties, a few thousand votes–a few hundred votes–could well mean the difference between first place and second and third or, for that matter, third and fifth. And such a small difference could be utterly decisive for who survives and who gets knocked out, who has momentum and who falters.

ME: That sounds right. There are five viable GOP candidates in Iowa. The two of them who finish fourth and fifth are going to be in for a world of hurt. And if, say, Huckabee manages to finish third, those fourth- and fifth-place finishers are going to be top-tier candidates. But Kristol’s bottom-line on the race is the right one–expect the unexpected. With the compression of the calendar, with a viable pro-choicer in the race, with Feb. 5, it’s going to be very hard to tell how this thing is going to bounce.