Hoopla and hype hover over unsettled GOP field

WASHINGTON — Sarah Palin draws crowds with her hide-and-seek bus tour. Michele Bachmann says Palin's plans won't dissuade her from her likely presidential bid. Iowa GOP activists travel to New Jersey to implore Gov. Chris Christie to run, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry weighs a campaign.

The Republican presidential field is far less settled than it seemed just a week ago, and it shows few signs of jelling soon.

With campaigning off to a slow start in early-voting states, half a dozen potential candidates are mulling whether to jump in. So keen is the interest, among journalists at least, that two news helicopters tracked Palin's East Coast bus trip to Philadelphia.

The stepped-up interest follows decisions by three prominent Republicans — Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee and Mitch Daniels — to forgo a campaign, making the field less crowded than some had expected.

Meanwhile, GOP activists don't appear ready to start narrowing their choices just yet. They seem unconcerned that an important Iowa straw poll is 74 days away and President Barack Obama's re-election team is setting up shop in dozens of states.

Unease about presumed frontrunner Mitt Romney is prompting some Republican activists to continue casting about for new faces, such as Perry or Christie, or even familiar faces, such as Palin or Rudy Giuliani.

Other party insiders, however, say the talk is unfair to Romney and other candidates. Several of them could prove to be formidable challengers to Obama, these Republicans say.

"Look at the housing numbers today," said Republican consultant Danny Diaz, referring to a key index of home prices that hit its lowest level in nine years. Obama will be vulnerable on housing, jobs and the overall economy, Diaz said, and the eventual Republican nominee's clout will make the current hand-wringing seem foolish in retrospect.

One thing is non-debatable: The race is off to a much slower start than was the 2008 version.

In Iowa, which holds the nation's first caucus, campaign traffic had reached deeply into the 99 counties at this stage four years ago. Now, it has barely scratched the surface, said Crawford County GOP Chairwoman Gwen Ecklund.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has visited the state more than a dozen times. And Bachmann, a third-term U.S. House member from Minnesota, has signaled plans to campaign aggressively in Iowa if she runs for the nomination.

But only former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who registers scant support in national polls, has visited Ecklund's county, part of GOP-rich western Iowa. "There isn't a whole lot of commitment or excitement for any one candidate yet," Ecklund said.

The biggest excitement in recent days has surrounded Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee. Her bus tour, which stopped Tuesday at the Gettysburg battlefield, Liberty Bell and New York City, is equal parts carnival, photo op and breezy history lesson.

Her meeting and dinner with real estate mogul and almost-candidate Donald Trump did nothing to tamp down the frenzy and frothiness.

Palin refuses to give reporters her schedule, and then gently upbraids them for their pell-mell efforts to locate, photograph and interview her. It's not clear that she will run for president, and some suspect her "One Nation" tour is designed mainly to support her lucrative book sales and TV appearances. If Palin does run for president, many Republican strategists feel she will do poorly, as her combative nature has driven down her approval ratings among GOP voters and others.

Yet by some counts, more than 100 journalists trooped alongside Palin in Philadelphia, an entourage that Pawlenty and others can only dream of. "It's quite chaotic anywhere we get off on the bus," Palin acknowledged.