After Iowa: Is there room for both McCain and Giuliani?

DES MOINES, Iowa - It's Wednesday night, and Hillary Clinton's face is on the TV screen. In another moment she'll say something funny; apparently she's capable of it. This was a festive evening for her, 24 hours before the Iowa caucus - but festive also for the host of the CBS Late Show. After being kept off the air by the Writers Guild strike, David Letterman is back. So he chose to open the show with a slight by Clinton: "Dave has been off the air for eight long weeks because of the writers strike," she said in a taped opening from Iowa. "Tonight, he's back. Oh, well, all good things come to an end."

An end has also come to the crazy Iowa race. "'Caucus' is a Greek word," Letterman's rival Jay Leno explained on the NBC Tonight Show, "which means 'the only day anyone pays attention to Iowa.'" In any case it's time to look forward, to New Hampshire next week, and beyond.

Republican candidate John McCain spent Wednesday in New Hampshire, and came here only in the afternoon, for a final campaign blitz. At 8 P.M., running very late (ice on the airport runway), he stepped out of the car into the bitter cold, and immediately entered the crowded, stuffy room where several hundred supporters were waiting with boundless patience. They already heard the flattering new poll numbers: McCain leads in New Hampshire, McCain takes national Republican lead in a new Pew Research Center poll - ahead of Rudy Giuliani, the front-runner all year. It's just by 1 percent, but it's the momentum that counts. McCain's up, Giuliani's down.

A week ago we reported here on McCain's progress, a by-product of America's relative success in Iraq in recent months. But McCain doesn't stick only to Iraq. He is the candidate insisting that the 2008 elections focus, ultimately, on foreign policy. "I know Pakistan. I know Israel," he declared. "I know these countries" - meaning the problematic ones that demand special attention.

Three senators accompany McCain to the event: former presidential candidate Sam Brownback of Kansas, John Thune of South Dakota, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who tells the crowd how much world leaders respect McCain.

He counts among his friends several Israelis, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

McCain left "my favorite Democrat" back in New Hampshire to carry on the good work. The mention of Joe Lieberman of Connecticut brings cheers from the crowd here in Iowa. Two weeks ago Lieberman announced his endorsement of the Republican McCain - a pretty astonishing move for someone who ran for vice president seven years ago on the Democratic ticket alongside Al Gore (as well as the first Jew to contend for that high office). And now the rumors that nobody confirms are spreading, and have reached all the way to senior officials in Jerusalem: Lieberman may also be McCain's running mate.

As McCain's candidacy picks up speed, questions abound regarding Giuliani's bid. John Podhoretz, the new editor of the neoconservative Commentary, observed this week that "the candidacies of Giuliani and McCain are one and the same - a pitch to be the president best suited to fighting the war on terror based on strong leadership skills and personal heroism." Now that McCain's position is growing stronger, it's not certain there will be room for both of them. One will have to disappear for the other to win the party's nomination.

The two candidates do have different takes on the Israeli issue. McCain's is the more traditional approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though he recently explained that a gradual solution is preferable to trying to resolve the conflict in one go, and also said that an American victory in Iraq is a necessary precondition for a successful Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

Still, McCain supports establishing a Palestinian state at the end of the process. Giuliani is more radical: he is not at all certain that a Palestinian state is in America's best interest, as he recently explained in an article for Foreign Affairs.