WHEN the annual Iowa state fair opened in Des Moines last week the summer celebrations of America's rich rural traditions included an "ugliest cake" contest. It may prove the only Iowa competition that is not won this year by Mitt Romney, the eye-catching former Massachusetts governor who is threatening to shake up the Republican race for the White House in 2008.
"I love everything that comes out of your mouth," one adoring Iowa Republican cooed to Romney at an "Ask Mitt anything" fundraising dinner in Cedar Rapids. "I just think he's such a smart man," said Walter Willett after a breakfast meeting in Tama.
By gambling heavily on early success in the tortuous campaign for the Iowa caucuses - the key primary vote that traditionally launches the White House election season - Romney is hoping to wake up this morning with a largely symbolic but politically valuable victory under his silver-buckled belt.
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Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, and Fred Thompson, the former senator and Hollywood actor, may be well ahead in the national polls, but in Iowa Romney has been sweeping all before him in an expensive bid to be taken seriously as the Republican successor to George W Bush.
An Iowa University poll last week gave Romney 26.9% of Republican voters likely to attend the state caucuses next January; Giuliani had only 11.3% and Thompson trailed with 6.5%. Both men decided not to invest in expensive campaigns for straw poll votes, but are headed to Iowa this week in a bid to make up lost ground.
Despite heavy sniping from rival camps about his political sincerity and his religious background Romney, 60, is proving a formidable grassroots campaigner with an enviable knack for surprising and impressing the mostly conservative farming folk of the American corn belt.
It doesn't hurt that he is 6ft 2in, was once named by People magazine as one of the 50 most beautiful people in America, and possesses a large and improbably photogenic family, in marked contrast to the chequered marital history of several of his Republican rivals.
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Barnstorming across rural Iowa last week he was accompanied by his wife Ann, a striking blonde, who was 15 when they first met 42 years ago. "She is still my greatest campaign adviser, my sweetheart," he declared in Cedar Rapids to "aaahs" from the crowd.
At one stop, he had just finished emphasising how important it was for parents to tell their children that "before you have babies you get married", when the curtains behind him opened and two of his five adult sons emerged, one with a wife who was carrying her baby son Parker, one of Romney's 10 grandchildren. When the little boy smiled and clapped, several supporters wiped away tears.
Yet there's more to Romney than his seemingly bulletproof family image. The son of a former Michigan governor who also ran for president - unsuccessfully - in 1968, Romney is a multi-millionaire venture capitalist who earned a reputation when he rescued the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from a corruption scandal and went on to be elected the Republican governor of a state whose senior senator is Ted Kennedy, the veteran liberal Democrat.
In person Romney comes across as a smooth performer with a neat line in political put-downs. Senator Hillary Clinton's presidential programme amounted to "out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx", he said at one stop. Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic contender who has been under fire for a series of foreign policy gaffes, had said he was "going to sit down for tea with our enemies [in Cuba and Venezuela], but then he's going to bomb our allies [in Pakistan]".
When I caught up with Romney in eastern Iowa I asked him if his own international inexperience might not prove a handicap once the campaign moved away from Iowa's cows and corn. "Oh, I don't think by being elected a senator you suddenly become an expert on world affairs," he said, in an obvious dig at Obama.
Romney added that during his career in international finance and his stewardship of the Olympics he had met "many international leaders. Just as Ronald Reagan was successful in combating the Soviet Union, I think a person outside Washington has a better chance of meeting today's challenges than anyone inside".
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Last week Romney was repeatedly asked to explain why he now opposes abortion. "I was not always pro-life," he acknowledged to one meeting, "but I'm proud I made the same discovery that Ronald Reagan did." As a Hollywood actor the former president supported abortion, but as a Republican candidate he opposed it.
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Yet neither the Mormon nor the abortion issue bothered Dawn Pettengill, a former state legislator who attended the Tama breakfast meeting. "You can't agree with anyone 100%," she said. "But you want a president who's going to listen to all sides and make a good value judgment."
So what did she think of Romney? "I was really impressed," she said. After last night's Iowa poll Romney plans to impress further afield.
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