ON TUESDAY, in 2,142 Iowa homes and meeting halls in 99 counties, including Madison County of the famous bridges, some 150,000 Republican voters will jump start the Republican race for the White House.
The race is Senator Bob Dole's to lose, which he might well do.
Although he is long time favourite to take the Republican nomination in the caucus and primary battles of the coming weeks, a weak showing here would have the US media writing his political obituary.
Some death notices have already appeared, particularly since his disastrous televised response to President Clinton's stately and clever State of the Union message last month. Senator Dole, fighting a cold and his mouth dry from medication, came across like a mortician. His performance bombed.
In Iowa and in New Hampshire, where the first primary election takes place in 10 days, his ratings were already going down in the face of a challenge from the publishing heir, Steve Forbes, which demolished Senator Dole's aura of inevitability. From being the front runner and favourite son in Iowa, Dole has been reduced to leading a stop Forbes campaign, with some help from the media and other candidates.
Faced with a blitz of television advertising from Forbes attacking him as a Washington insider - the ultimate insult to alienated voters outside the capital's Beltway - Dole has gone from ignoring the ever smiling publisher to hitting back. He now belittles his flat tax as a flaky plan which would ruin farmers in Iowa, and accuses Forbes of trying to buy the White House.
Dole is vulnerable to the charge of being an insider. No one is more securely anchored inside the Beltway than the long serving 72 year old senator whose home is in the Watergate complex and who has occupied every high office he sought, except the presidency.
He was always an uneasy partner with Newt Gingrich in the failed Republican revolution, when the House Speaker and his freshmen tried to unravel the New Deal. Mr Gingrich attacked the senator in the 1980s as a "tax collector for the welfare state".
Mr Dole cannot bear to hang around at meetings when the loquacious Gingrich is in a preaching mode.
But at campaign stops in the backwoods, the Senate Majority Leader tries to be partisan, and his lack of conviction shows. It is also the wrong tactic. Compromise is more popular with most voters since the budget impasse shut the country down at the end of last year.
Bob Dole, war hero, is fighting his last campaign, and Bob Dole is ready, he says. Steve Forbes, never elected to any position, is untested. Dole has endorsements from 21 of 31 Republican governors, and this will count as the primary campaign rolls across the US.
But ready or not, the percentage of Republicans who wish there was another candidate in the race has risen in three months from 34 to 42 per cent while the front runner has flagged.
Polls show Dole would lose by 52 to 43 points in a race against President Clinton if the election were held today. The Kansas senator needs to win the Iowa caucus now to stay buoyant. He is still ahead and he has won the endorsement of the state's religious right - with which he has never been comfortable - but he is still well below the 37 per cent he won in Iowa in 1988.
He is threatened from two sides, on the one by Forbes, on the other by Patrice Buchanan, bouncing in from his victory over Senator Phil Gramm is he Louisiana caucus this week, a contest the top candidates ignored.
The conservative columnist Buchanan is an attractive pro life figure to the religious right which runs Iowa's Republican Party. Evangelist Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition issued scorecards for candidates which betrayed more enthusiasm about Buchanan and Senator Gramm than for Dole.
The real nightmare for the Senate leader could be New Hampshire, his nemesis in earlier campaigns. It is an anti tax state which is flirting with an anti tax candidate in the shape of Steve Forbes.
The senator lost here to George Bush in 1988, after winning Iowa. It was a bitter blow. This time he has the support of the state governor, who backed Bush four years ago.
The road ahead after New Hampshire gets bleaker. In Arizona, where the next contest takes place on February 27th, Mr Forbes is ahead in the polls. Senator Dole needs to survive and dominate the early March contests in New England and New York.
The oldest candidate in the field, like Mr Bush in 1992, appears, however, to have no vision to inspire voters or to energise the party for a head on fight with Clinton. Dole is relying on tactical ifs and maybes. Like, perhaps, support for Forbes proving to be soft.
This may be the case. In a Boston Globe poll that put the publisher ahead in New Hampshire, seven out of 10 voters said they wanted to know more about him.
Much of the frenzy about Forbes is inspired by his ever present advertisements. He has name recognition among children in Iowa and New Hampshire. The average New Hampshire voter has seen a Forbes advertisement up to 50 times.
Whatever about the children's reactions, the adults are confused. They see a grinning, goofy face but also a ruthless campaign of negative advertising.
No one has ever tried before to go over the heads of the party organisers in this way. The experts do not know how it will play in the polling booths. "I don't have a clue what will happen," confessed one Republican pollster.
FORBES has generated excitement by pushing with Reaganesque simplicity "hope, growth and opportunity" and peddling the message that professional politicians cannot be trusted. His weakness is that, for all their distaste for Washington, voters actually might prefer a politician to make serious political decisions in the Oval Office.
The media have failed to find any crippling scandals in Forbes's past, but in the last few days stories have appeared painting him in an unsavoury light.
He attacked negative campaign advertising in the columns of his magazine Forbes. He deducted lavish parties as business expenses, and reduced property taxes on his estate by classifying much of it as farmland - classic cases of using tax loopholes for the wealthy.
Journalists working for newspapers he owns in New Jersey have complained he is stingy. Conservatives are also turning against the publishing heir for his support for abortion rights.
The outsiders in the race hope that Dole's campaign will expire for lack of political oxygen and that the Forbes bubble will burst. Former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, for one, sees himself as a lifeboat for the Republican party when the old Dole warship and the Forbes luxury yacht sink in the choppy waters ahead. "Chaos is our friend," said his spokesman.
Alexander's case is essentially that only he can beat Clinton. Dole is too old, Forbes too flaky, Patrick Buchanan too isolationist, and Phil Gramm and Senator Dick Lugar just no hopers. His campaign slogan is "It's as simple as ABC - Alexander Beats Clinton".
The most colourless of candidates attacks Dole, a war hero, on the age issue, telling audiences he has great respect for the second World War generation but that "it is time to move on".
Alexander is the most dogged campaigner. He has visited Iowa more than 70 times. His poll figures rarely get into the teens. To most voters, Lamar Alexander is dependable, solid on the issues, unblemished by scandal, but dull - dull as the plaid shirt he wore until mocked for trying too hard to win the pick up truck vote.
He favours many conservative projects, such as a balanced budget, the abolition of the education department and greater state rights over crime control, welfare reform and abortion, but opposes a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion and moves to make English the official language.
There is, in fact, not much day light between him and Clinton which speaks more of the President's move to the centre than Mr Alexander's liberalism. He is fourth among money raisers, gathering in $10 million (£6.25 million) last year, but this does not always translate into electoral advantage.
Senator Phil Gramm, now regarded as the first loser of the campaign after his defeat at the hands of Pat Buchanan in Louisiana, raised $15.6 million, and in the early stages was the top Republican money raiser.
Buchanan is also raking in serious money, $6.7 million last year and more since his victory in the Catholic Louisiana bayous this week. In Iowa, right to life volunteers worked the telephones during the recent deep freeze to rally support for a candidate who mixes religious fundamentalism with a protectionist, blue collar populism. In New Hampshire Buchanan is a familiar figure and a favourite with the gun lobby.
But even Buchanan loyalists doubt that he can win enough delegates in the big states like New York and California to dominate a Republican convention.
FOR Republicans the worst case scenario may become; a best case scenario. Senator Dole and Forbes cancel each other out, neither winning enough delegates to dominate the convention. Buchanan frightens off Republican moderates and Gramm, Alexander, and the other half dozen Republican hopefuls fail to emerge from the pack. The Republican Party faces its first uncommitted convention since 1920.
It then chooses Colin Powell, the retired general who declined to run last year, but as a friend told Newsweek, while the door remains closed, it is not locked.