Back in Iowa, With the Usual Fuss DES MOINES - There is always something a little peculiar about coming to Iowa for its quadrennial day of fame, but this time it was particularly disconcerting for me to land in an otherwise unremarkable Midwestern city for its first-in-the-season presidential nominating contest. I came here after a week's vacation in Utah, where hardly anyone I talked to cared hardly at all about the election, despite that fact that a former governor, Jon Huntsman, is a candidate (barely registering in the polls, but still officially a candidate) for the Republican nomination and the leading candidate, Mitt Romney, has spiritual connections to Utah through the Mormon church. In Utah, all anyone really wanted to talk about was the lack of jobs in the sagging recovery, and the lack of snow on the mountains. I couldn't find anyone who was really excited about any of the presidential candidates, including President Obama. In Iowa, everyone is talking about the campaign, which they are, of course, required to do to justify the attention that is devoted to the caucuses. But even Iowa Republicans are not enthusiastic about the crop of inadequate presidential contenders. It's always risky to predict outcomes in the Iowa caucuses, so I don't know how much to believe today's wisdom - which is that Mr. Romney is leading, probably, or tied with Representative Ron Paul of Texas and that Rick Santorum, the former Senator from Pennsylvania, is the latest hot challenger. It's easy to come down hard on how ridiculous the Iowa causes are, because they are. The gatherings tomorrow don't actually have an impact on the selection of delegates to the Republican National Convention. For all the ballyhoo about how democratic the caucuses are, they are actually deeply anti-democratic. To participate, you have to be willing to spend three or four hours at a neighbor's house or in a church or other community space, which means if you work at night, you're completely shut out. If you don't have a car, you're out of luck. The Republicans in Iowa are also a particularly conservative bunch, which means the candidates have been running farther out onto the lunatic right-wing fringe than the Republicans who dominate Congress these days, and that's pretty far out. Frank Bruni did a great job of capturing this tedious phenomenon in his column on Sunday. The trick for the nominee will be to somehow claw his way back toward the center - actually more like the right of center or the right of the right of center. There are some bright spots in the Iowa gloom this year. It was not all that long ago that I was puzzling over how anyone, even a hard-right Republican, could possibly consider Newt Gingrich to be a serious candidate. After his brief few minutes of "front runner" status in polls that reflected only his dominance in the news coverage, Mr. Gingrich has sunk lie a rock in Iowa. And this year has provided a nice break from the endless talk about ethanol that usually weighs down the Iowa contest. The absurd subsidy for the corn-based fuel additive expired last weekend without much of a fuss at all. So, I'll be here for the next couple of days having fun with all of this, and maybe even making some sense of it, with David Firestone, a member of our editorial board who covers politics, and my blog editor, Juliet Lapidos.