Mammoths.(The Talk of the Town)(Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at the Iowa caucuses)

For reasons not yet revealed, Hillary Clinton held her final Iowa campaign rally in a museum. The event, on the eve of the caucuses, opened to the sounds of the Canadian band Bachman-Turner Overdrive's 1973 classic "Takin' Care of Business" and closed with "9 to 5," Dolly Parton's 1980 ode to (and movie about) work. In between, as Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea Clinton waved and clapped to the music, it felt very much like watching the reunion of a nineteen-nineties band.

The size of the room wasn't quite up to the occasion--the final night of such a long and hard-fought campaign--and there were pockets of empty space. At the top of a column abutting the stage were the words "witness to change." "Change," as just about everyone in Iowa understood, had become the most important word in this Presidential campaign.

Rather than "demanding it," like John Edwards, or "hoping for it," like Barack Obama, Hillary told Iowans, "I believe you bring about change by working really, really hard." So it seemed rather lucky that her campaign had found an event space with a version of that slogan inscribed in the architecture. But, on closer inspection, it turned out that the phrase was part of an exhibit for the mammoths, long extinct, that once roamed what is now Iowa. The skeleton of one of the beasts loomed ominously a few yards from the Clintons, and the museum's exhibit explained that the mammoths were witnesses to change because they "watched as their world disappeared and their dominance was usurped."

The Clinton nostalgia tour plays better in New Hampshire, so it's premature to declare the collapse of the Clintoncene epoch. But in Iowa Hillary seemed to be hobbled by a top-heavy, less indigenous campaign that was more reliant on outsiders than Obama's. For instance, on caucus night, at the Brookview Elementary School in West Des Moines, it was up to one Karen Brooks to marshal Clinton's troops in a large precinct that in 2004 generally mirrored the statewide results. Brooks, who is five feet ten with long fire-red hair, was an improbable choice for the job. She is not an Iowa organizer but a Washington consultant to multinational corporations operating in Asia. Her last vaguely political post was director of Asia affairs for the National Security Council. But, following her arrival in Des Moines to volunteer for the last days of Clinton's campaign, desperate staffers assigned her an entire precinct to run on caucus night.

As Iowans streamed into the Brookview gymnasium, a pattern quickly emerged. Dozens of voters stopped at a cafeteria table, where they registered as Democrats, and then headed to a corner of the room under Obama campaign signs. "We have a lot more Independents and Republicans coming in," Jim Riordan, the chairman of the caucus, said, as he gestured ...