It’s smart to stay above the fray in Iowa

By JAMES P. PINKERTON

LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY

Our politics lesson for today is tertius gaudens — Latin for “the happy third.” That is, the one who gets to sit on the sidelines as two others duke it out. We can see the main event happening now in Iowa.

So the smart strategy in a crowded presidential caucus is this: Stay out of the way of enemies destroying each other — and then dash to victory.

The idea of tertius gaudens goes way back, of course, to ancient wars and balance-of-power politics. Britain, for example, was always happy to see its rivals on the European continent — France, Spain, Germany — fight each other, and thus weaken each other, as the British mostly sat back and watched.

Meanwhile, in political wars, the would-be victor must calibrate the need to beat back rivals with the need to stay likable — because to become unlikable is to open a path to some new rival. As Gary Hart said during the 1984 presidential campaign, those who “go negative” risk having those negatives come back on them, in a “Greek or biblical sense.”

So, yes, for lots of reasons, it’s best to stay above the fray — if you can. But whether candidates like it or not, sometimes it’s necessary to body-check one’s opponent out of the way.

And so the “happy third” is often the happy by-product of other candidates’ miscalculation. That was the case for John Kerry four years ago, when the Massachusetts Democrat was trailing badly in the run-up to the 2004 Iowa caucus. The front-runners were Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean, who naturally squared off against each other. But instead of either Gephardt or Dean winning, they both lost: Kerry dashed in between the falling bodies to emerge as the caucus winner.

Gephardt and Dean must have known what was happening as they went into their mutual death dance, but in politics, as in any other aspect of human nature, once the adrenal chain reaction starts, it’s tough to shut it down.

Happy thirds

Today, in Iowa, the leading contenders are once again hurting each other — and letting happy thirds emerge. On the Democratic side, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards have typically been ranked first and second in the Hawkeye State. And so they’ve been avidly clobbering each other for months now. But the beneficiary has been a third hopeful, Barack Obama, who has eschewed negative campaigning.

Now Obama is in first place, according to the latest poll in the Des Moines Register. So with a month to go, will the top Democrats be able to wheel around their political guns, targeting the new No. 1? And if they do, will some other Democrat — say, Bill Richardson — emerge as the happiest one of all?

The same phenomenon could be happening on the Republican side, to the advantage of dark horse Mike Huckabee. In the wake of last week’s CNN-YouTube debate, pundit Dick Morris observed of the two GOP front-runners, “Romney and Rudy ripped each other apart to the likely benefit of Huckabee, who ... remained serenely atop the debate while others kicked and clawed below.”

For his part, Huckabee seemed to understand his situation perfectly. In a recent session with reporters, he applied an analogy, not from Latin verse, but from NASCAR: “When you’ve got several cars on the track, and they get to bumping each other, there’s a good chance that one or both of them are going to run or bump each other off the track.” So, the ex-Arkansas governor explained, “what you want to do is to make sure you’re not in the path of the wreck when it happens.” Got that, drivers?

But now Huckabee and Obama are no longer happy thirds. According to the latest Iowa numbers, they are happy firsts. And that, of course, is the best place to be — if they can avoid further tangles as they race toward the Jan. 3 finish line.

X Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.