Here is The Register:

U.S. Rep. Steve King, a conservative Republican who won re-election in western Iowa, said he tried without success to get McCain to soften his position on ethanol.

King said he suggested to McCain’s advisers that the candidate talk about the 2015 mandate for ethanol usage as a workable goal. McCain didn’t take the advice and instead kept attacking ethanol, King said.

In the end, ethanol was one of several issues that hurt McCain, including his support for the bailout of the financial system, King said. King said McCain needed to get at least 60 percent of the vote in his district to have a chance at winning Iowa but wound up with less than 50 percent.

Obama is widely reported to be using Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” book on Lincoln as something of a guide when building his cabinet, which is expected to include Republicans and Democrats with points of view that had been at odds with many of his own during the primary and caucuses process.

U.S. News & World Report is one outlet reporting the potential of Leach or Vilsack.

Barack Obama speaks at Carroll High School just before the Iowa Caucuses.

Carroll County — which went for President-elect Barack Obama in the Iowa Caucuses nearly a year ago — was there for him again Tuesday.

After going for President George W. Bush in the last two elections, Carroll County went for Obama.  The Illionis Democrat earned 51 percent of the county’s votes, while GOP hopeful John McCain drew 47 percent.  In raw votes, that is 5,284 to 4,905. State Democratic officials said the county was one they paid attention to as something of a bellwether.

“We finally got a man who I think really showed some intelligence,” said Butch Heisterkamp, chairman of the Carroll County Democratic Party.

Iowa as a whole went was called early in the night for Obama — 54 percent to GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s 45 percent.

For his part, Heisterkamp was an early Obama supporter.

He introduced Obama at a Carroll rally just after Labor Day in 2007 and minutes later formally endorsed him, becoming one of the first county chairs to do so.

“I got on there a little bit early,” Heisterkamp said. “I just believed in the man.”

With a nearly 70 percent turnout among registered voters in Carroll County, Obama dominated the ground game with absentee ballots and early voting.

“We had a good organization,” Heisterkamp said. “We were here in January in the caucus times.”

State Rep Rod Roberts, R-Carroll, who himself won re-election, said the McCain campaign sailed into a furious Democratic headwind — and deserves credit for doing as well as it did against long odds.

“Regardless of the nominee the cycle and trends favored the Democrats this time around,” Roberts said.
Roberts said that ironically and with great unfairness, McCain’s position on the war in Iraq, his support for the surge, helped matters in that conflict and largely took the issue off the table for the election in favor of the economy.

“That (the economy) became the pre-eminent issue among voters,” Roberts said.

What’s more, Roberts — an early and consistent supporter of McCain even during the darkest days of the primary campaign and caucuses campaign — said he had several conversations with area farmers, generally conservative, who punished McCain at the polls for the Arizonan’s hostility to ethanol and agricultural subsidies — which McCain expressed during campaign stops and in two of the  highly watched presidential debates.

“There were some people who were concerned about his position on ethanol and renewable fuels,” Roberts said.

Those concerns, Roberts said, help explain a remarkable dynamic in which both Obama and U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, carried Carroll County.

Heisterkamp and other local Obama supporters said they received enthusiastic calls late Tuesday from young Obama staff people who spent months in Carroll before the caucuses, and then moved on to other states.

“We got that done,” Heisterkamp said. “We got Iowa for him.”

In terms of sheer logistics, boots-on-the-ground campaigning, Obama is overwhelmed McCain here.
Obama had an office in Carroll, and has had staff in place dating back well before the caucuses. Additionally, Obama campaigned in Carroll twice.

Obama, who pulled crowds of more than 600 people in each of the two visits here, turned that enthusiasm into living and breathing Iowa Caucuses support in capturing Carroll County with 35 percent of the delegates.

McCain never visited Carroll.

The nation’s first African-American president, Obama captured Carroll, a county that is 98.8 percent white, according to the 2006 U.S. Census.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Mary Bruner, an Obama supporter from Carroll. “People are using the term transformational and I really think it was. I was talking to my kids who are in their 20s. They don’t see that color. I really hope that’s the way the world is going to be.”

Obama won Crawford and Audubon and Greene Counties, but lost in Sac and Calhoun counties.

With the exception of Monona County, which went for McCain, Obama won a stretch a counties along the U.S. Highway 30 Corridor running across the state from Crawford County to the Mississippi River.

In highly controversial remarks in the campaign season King said that if Obama is elected “al-Qaeda and the radical Islamists and their supporters will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11.”

King told the World-Herald he’s standing by those words.

“I made my prediction,” King said. “I made it in March, and I stand by the words I said then.”

King had 60 percent of the vote with 402 of 417 precincts reporting, a wide margin that will send him back to Washington for a fourth term and keep him very much politically alive for a potential run for governor in 2010.

King pulled in huge margins in reliably conserative counties in far northwest Iowa that buoyed him to the win over Democratic challenger Rob Hubler, a Navy veteran and retired Presbyterian minister from Council Bluffs.

While President-elect Barack Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, captured the Hawkeye State, his coattails stopped short of western Iowa. Republican presidential candidate. Obama, for example, won Carroll County, a bellwether in the middle of the distict, that went for King as well.

“We just didn’t have the right amount of money to get the name ID out there,” Hubler told Iowa Independet just after midnight.

Hubler said the sprawling rural district has no major media market, a factor he thinks kept national Democratic dollars out of the race.

“That just prejudices all the money against rural areas,” Hubler said.

This poll watcher has been out at the sites since 7:30 a.m. The Barack Obama campaign has attorneys at some sites in Carroll watching the poll watchers. But so far, no GOP presence. This in a county that went for President George W. Bush in the last two elections. Perhaps this is more evidence of a strong Obama ground game playing out — as well as a state Republican party that is, in the analysis of NBC News national political director, in some disarray.

As of last Friday, Carroll County had 14,969 registered voters: 5,310 Democrats, 3,155 Republicans, 6,499 no party voters, and five others.

How the no party voters break here could say a lot about the state of the race across Iowa, although with an economy that has so far avoided the worst of the nation’s economic crisis, voters here may be more persuaded by social issues — as the many letters to the editor in the Carroll Daily Times Herald dealing with the issue of abortion show.

Some factors to consider:

While it is historically Democratic, Carroll County now has two Republican state legislators running unopposed.

In terms of sheer logistics, or boots-on-the-ground campaigning, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is overwhelming Republican John McCain.

Obama has an office here and has had staff in place dating back well before the caucuses. Additionally, Obama campaigned in Carroll twice, just after Labor Day 2007 as the caucus season heated up and in the final days after Christmas.

Obama, who pulled crowds of more than 600 people in each of two visits here, turned that enthusiasm into living and breathing Iowa caucuses support in capturing Carroll County with 35 percent of the delegates.

McCain never visited Carroll although highly popular (and unopposed) State Rep. Rod Roberts, R-Carroll, was an early supporter of McCain who stuck with the Arizona senator even as the campaign struggled in Iowa.

With Obama bringing new voters, and a well-oiled campaign organization, into the process, history may be out the window.

That said, Carroll County will be watched closely because it went to Obama in the Iowa caucuses and to President George W. Bush in the last two general elections — 55 percent to 45 percent for Sen. John Kerry in 2004.

In 2004, the president’s positioning on national security issues and abortion factored heavily into his overwhelming victory in Carroll County, local supporters said then.

“Carroll County is no longer a Democratic County,” said former Republican lieutenant governor Art Neu the day after the 2004 election. “People may still register Democratic out of force of habit.”

Added then Carroll County Republican Chairman John Werden, “Maybe in the future you can quit referring to Carroll County as traditionally Democratic. That’s old news.”

Prior to 2000 Democrats racked up some big wins in the county. In 1960 John F. Kennedy won with 60 percent of the vote in Carroll County, beating Richard Nixon.

Four years later, President Lyndon Johnson walloped Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, 76 percent to 23 percent in Carroll County.

During the Iowa caucuses, the eyes of much of the world were on Carroll, and for that reason alone, the race here is seen as revealing.

A British television crew from Sky News filmed a segment on in the caucus activity here on Adams Street downtown.

Sirius Satellite Radio did a live interview from Carroll and the Washington Post and Associated Press have frequently filed stories with a Carroll dateline.

“With 25-plus appearances by the candidates, three campaign headquarters and numerous other visits, it’s no wonder that as caucuses come to culmination, Carroll will be a very important hub,” said Jim Gossett, executive director of the Carroll Area Development Corp.

No matter the outcome, Carroll Countians can’t claim they were uninformed. The county had 26 presidential candidate visits in the 2008 cycle — showing that the campaigns saw the area as valuable political turf.

Not bad for a guy from Kiron, Iowa — looking at this from the no publicity is bad publicity angle. No wonder Ann Coulter thinks King should be president.

The first round of controversy drew on King’s comment last week at a Sarah Palin rally – as first reported by Iowa Independent – that the nation would be in danger of slipping into a “totalitarian dictatorship” if Barack Obama is elected president.

Olbermann blasted King is a special comment. Colmes hit on it on his blog.

Then on Fridaty night, just before going to the “New Rules” segment, Bill Maher on his “Real Time” HBO program referenced the following King comment:

“I’ll just say this, that when you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected president of the United States — and I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world?” King said. ”What does it look like to the world of Islam? And I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the … the radical Islamists, the … the al-Qaeda and the radical Islamists and their supporters will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11.”

Maher disagreed directly with King, mentioning the congressman’s name on the show. Maher said that John McCain, given to more Bush-like hubris on foreign affairs, likely would be a better recruiting tool for terrorists than Obama.

Harkin told Iowa Independent that he was one of a few senators acting as a kind of a political “godfather” for Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage who is taking on convicted felon U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, in what is a tight race that could give the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority.

“It’s going very well for him,” Harkin said of Begich. “I think we’re going to pick up that Alaska seat. I think people just recognize that, you know, only five senators in the history of this country have ever been convicted of a felony. This is not going to sit well.”

As Palin, the GOP vice presidential candidate, addressed a crowd estimated at 10,000 at Hy-Vee Hall a week ago, Sinnard was standing behind the Alaska governor — seeing the event in the same way Palin did.

Sarah Palin signs an autograph in Sioux City last Saturday. Later that day, she appeared at HyVee Hall in Des Moines.

“Everybody was just enamored and excited, hanging on her words,” Sinnard said. “Since I was behind her, I could see the reaction of those who were watching her and, wow, is she good. She drew a huge crowd that was energized and ready to get out the vote.”

Sinnard said there is substance behind the media caricature of Palin. “She got to where she was on her own,” she said. “She didn’t have a man to get there like Hillary [Clinton].”

What’s more, Sinnard said, Palin’s message will resonate with Iowans.

“I thought her speech was very good,” Sinnard said.  “She referenced Joe the farmer and that drew a lot of applause.  I catch a lot of everyone’s — Obama, (Sen. Joe) Biden, McCain — speeches via cable TV as I work from home.  So, some of the aspects of her speech weren’t new to me, but to those who aren’t as obsessed as I can be with politics, it was very good. She attacked Obama on taxes, spreading the wealth.”

Most independent analysts say Obama’s economic plan would only raise taxes on the relatively small percentage of American families earning more than $250,000 per year.

Sinnard she said was thrilled that Arizonan McCain selected Palin as his running mate.

“I think she has a ton of experience and I think she deserves to be where she is,” Sinnard said, adding, “What has (Barack) Obama run?”

Sinnard, 41, a mother of three children who works for a New York information technology firm virtually from a computer in her Carroll home, said that in spite of recent polls showing Democrat Obama ahead, she senses a tightening race.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Sinnard said. “The polls are getting closer.”

That said, Sinnard is frustrated with the popular image that has been created of Palin. She thinks not-so-thinly veiled sexism is very much at work in the media and Democrats’ portrayal of Palin.

“I think a white female is at the bottom of the totem pole these days,” Sinnard said.

She added, “I don’t even think they would have treated Condoleezza Rice like that.”

Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, was mentioned as both a presidential and vice presidential candidate for the Republicans, but she expressed no interest in those positions this cycle.

If McCain should lose on Tuesday, Sinnard expects Palin to be the immediate front-runner for the Republicans in the 2012 Iowa caucuses.