Predicting the outcome of a political contest, especially an American election, is no easy task. In August 1864, Abraham Lincoln implored his Cabinet to press ahead urgently in its effort to prevail in the great Civil War before Inauguration Day the next March, believing that he wouldn’t be re-elected. Little more than two months later, Lincoln, a visionary without great short-term vision, was returned to office with 55 percent of the vote against Gen. George B. McClellan.

Guessing the identity of the occupant of the White House by Inauguration Day 2009 isn’t much easier in the brief interregnum between last week’s Iowa caucuses and today’s New Hampshire primary. If we counted on Iowa to tell us a lot, then Richard A. Gephardt and Robert J. Dole – twin Midwestern winners of the caucuses and then twin duds in New Hampshire eight days later – would have faced off in the 1988 general election.

Even so, thanks to Iowa, we do know a little more now than we did at dinnertime on Thursday.

Money not everything

We know, for example, that money can’t buy you love, or else former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts wouldn’t be in the fix he’s in, having finished behind former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who provided new meaning to the notion of living off the land in Iowa. We know, too, that campaigns based on inevitability inevitably falter, or else Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York would be in a commanding position in the Democratic race rather than struggling for oxygen with two other contenders.

We know by the winning performance of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois that a black man can be a formidable candidate outside of the urban areas where black politicians have had their most profound impact. Iowa is only 2 percent black, yet Sen. Obama showed wide appeal. The biggest test of Sen. John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism came at the very end of the 1960 primaries, in heavily Protestant West Virginia. Sen. Obama’s test came at the very beginning of the 2008 primaries – and continues today in New Hampshire, where blacks constitute less than 1 percent of the population.

We know by the persistence of former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina that in Democratic contests dominated by purists, the purest candidate – with strong union support and strong positions against the Iraq war and for the poor and striving – can be competitive. It was telling Thursday night that the only real pocket of Clinton strength was on the more conservative Missouri River side of the state, hard by Republican Nebraska (a state Democrats have won only three times since 1920). That kind of appeal may be a small advantage in a general election, but it can be poison in primaries and caucuses.

Clinton ‘comeback’?

Now let’s look at what history suggests. The most obvious conclusion is that a family that was able to transform an early loss to a relatively unknown former senator with a history of cancer like Paul E. Tsongas into a “comeback” is going to try to pull the same magic again in New Hampshire. Surely someone has whispered in the Clintons’ ears that the two men who came in third in Iowa in 1988, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts and Vice President George H.W. Bush, won their parties’ nominations. Whether Hillary Clinton can pull off a comeback in 2008 as stunning as Bill Clinton’s in 1992 is one of the great questions hanging over American politics today.

Here is another: What do Huckabee and Edwards do now?

Huckabee, the second presidential contender in a generation from a single kindergarten in Hope, Ark., pulled off a remarkable victory in a state steeped in religious-conservative values. Now he moves to a state with church steeples on the town green, but with a far less emotive religious tradition and no tradition at all of voting by religious impulse since the 17th century. In Iowa, Huckabee spoke to the congregation. In New Hampshire, he must address the Congregationalists.

Edwards can only hope to live off the land in the Granite State the way Huckabee did in the Hawkeye State, but these are different places, with different ways of looking at things and different ways of campaigning. (Strain the metaphor a bit, and you will see that it is easier to live off the land in Iowa, with perhaps the most fertile soil in the world, than in New Hampshire, which is fit for raising low-brush blueberries on remote mountainsides in a short growing season.)

Iowans are romantics, and as such were willing to take a fling with Edwards, or at least fling him into the next round. The residents of New Hampshire are, above all, practical, and the only fling I can recall the state taking was with Sen. Gary W. Hart of Colorado in 1984, and that more to be obstreperous than to be flighty.

Establishment handicap

But one strong message does emerge from the snowy plains of Iowa and its bizarre quadrennial ritual in frosty schoolhouses and church basements: This may not be the right time to be an establishment politician. The GOP establishment candidate – the one with the money, the endorsements, the smart people – was Romney. The Democratic establishment candidate – with the same attributes as Romney, but with a former president and a former secretary of state in tow – was Clinton. Now we will see whether they, and the political establishment they represent, can have a revival of their own. That’s the story of Iowa 2008, and perhaps of the entire 2008 campaign.