US:The coffee and hot chocolate had long run out and the three-piece band had almost exhausted their repertoire of polkas on accordion, trumpet and guitar when Hillary Clinton pulled up at a long wooden barn outside Cumming.
It was after 9 pm the night after Christmas but hundreds had come to hear the candidate, who stepped on to a low platform before a makeshift curtain with her daughter Chelsea by her side.
"It's time to pick a president," yelled Iowa's former first lady, Christie Vilsack, who is co-chair of the Clinton campaign in the state. "Who is the person who, on the very first day, can hit the ground running?"
For much of 2007, Mrs Clinton's claim to being more experienced and better prepared to take on the presidency than her Democratic rivals was the key message of her campaign. As Barack Obama's promise of change gained ground in recent months, first in Iowa and later in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Mrs Clinton shifted her pitch, claiming that she was the best agent of change because she would not just hope for it but work hard to make it happen.
In the weeks before Christmas, as polls showed that Iowa voters were worried about Mrs Clinton's personal unpopularity, her campaign changed gear again, presenting the candidate's human side through appearances with her daughter and her mother, who lives with her in Washington.
Now, as she seeks to close the deal with Iowans ahead of next week's caucuses, Mrs Clinton has returned to her original argument, stressing her experience in Arkansas, in the White House and as a senator.
"Our next president will be sworn in on January 20th, 2009. Waiting on that president's desk in the Oval Office will be problems that are incredibly difficult, that present challenges to our leadership in the world, to our moral authority, to our economy, to the kind of society we are and want to be. These are some of the problems we know about," she said.
She warned, however, that there would be many other challenges that would be unexpected and that required a president who could take charge immediately.
Mr Obama's rise in the polls rattled the Clinton campaign, which spent much of the year cultivating an aura of inevitability around the former first lady. On the ground in Iowa, however, her organisation has been working methodically to secure promises from supporters to attend the caucuses, which are held at night and last more than an hour.
Jim McGinn, a retired publisher from Des Moines who came to hear Mrs Clinton at Cumming, said it was difficult to persuade people to caucus.
"There are still a lot of undecideds and probably in the next week or so, people will decide, but I'm hearing a lot of people talking about Obama," he said.
Mr Obama has the most lavishly funded campaign of any Democrat in Iowa and his gold-plated organisation was on full display yesterday morning when he spoke at a Masonic hall in Des Moines. Whereas Mrs Clinton strolled around the platform using a hand-held microphone that occasionally went on the blink, Mr Obama stood at a podium, using an autocue, with a bank of pre-coached volunteers stacked behind him and a row of television cameras ahead.
For Mr Obama, winning Iowa has become crucial if he is to topple Mrs Clinton as national frontrunner and yesterday he unveiled a new speech aimed at persuading voters that he is ready for office.
Dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and blue tie, he was introduced by two former Republicans, one of them a four-star general. Mr Obama told his audience that he was the only Democrat who could overcome the partisanship of Washington.
"You know that we can't afford four more years of the same divisive food fight in Washington that's about scoring political points instead of solving problems; that's about tearing your opponents down instead of lifting this country up," he said.
Recent polling in Iowa has Mr Obama losing the lead he held briefly over Mrs Clinton, while former senator John Edwards has a powerful organisation drawn from trade unionists that could help him to victory on January 3rd.
Mr Obama yesterday confronted his rivals' charge that his "politics of hope" is nothing more than a vague set of aspirations informed by political innocence and a reluctance to take the battle to the enemy.
"I know that when the American people believe in something, it happens," Mr Obama said.
"That's what hope is - that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting for us around the corner, but only if we're willing to work for it and fight for it, to shed our fears and our doubts and our cynicism, to glory in the task before us of remaking this country block by block, precinct by precinct, county by county, state by state."