DES MOINES -- Hillary Clinton will close out nearly a year of campaigning in Iowa with a New Year's Eve rally in downtown Des Moines late Monday night. It will be glitzy and splashy and will feature her most significant surrogate, her husband the former president.

But what is striking about the final days of one of the most fascinating campaigns any of us have witnessed here in Iowa is how Clinton has avoided becoming the focus of attention. The national front-runner has become, if not invisible, virtually ignored -- and that seems just the way she wants it.

Barack Obama and John Edwards have zeroed in on one another. Joe Biden, Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd hunger for attention. Clinton is methodically moving around the state, saying the same thing at virtually every stop. She has given a few interviews, but made little news.

The style is classic Hillary Clinton, the girl with the responsibility gene, the always-prepared student who never skips her homework. Her final days in Iowa are as disciplined as they are unexceptional -- except perhaps where it counts, in reaching out to Iowa voters. (But that we will not know until Thursday night.)

The campaigns are drowning in data but no one is certain about where the Democratic race is heading. Everyone here awaits the release of the Des Moines Register's final poll, which historically has been accurate in the order of finish, if not always the margins between the candidates.

But polling here is more treacherous than ever. Christmas interrupted opportunities to poll early last week. The weekend is never a good time to poll and particularly difficult between Christmas and New Year's. And the last days of the caucus campaign will be overtaken by celebrations ringing in the election year.

Beyond that, Iowans have stopped answering their phones. One Democrat estimated that proven caucusgoers are getting as many as 15 telephone calls a night from campaigns and pollsters. A young man I spoke to on Sunday night, who said he has attended more than 50 candidate events over the past year, said he gets about half a dozen each evening. Conditions for polling, as a result, couldn't be worse.

The campaigns are making their own phone calls to supporters and to undecided voters. They are working off elaborate and sophisticated targeting projections. The campaigns have their vote goals and all claim to be on track to meeting them. But all are based on assumptions of how large the turnout will be on Thursday -- and there the range of estimates is so large as to be laughable.

Eight years ago, just 59,000 Iowans participated in the Democratic caucuses. Four years ago that doubled to 124,181. This year estimates run to 140,000 or 160,000 -- or in the guesstimate of former Iowa Democratic chair (and Obama senior adviser) Gordon Fischer, up to 200,000 -- an astounding figure, but one which Fischer believes is plausible given the intensity that has been evident here for a year.

So campaign vote goals could be rendered virtually useless if there is an enormous surge in turnout on Thursday night. Everyone could hit their targets and find the numbers meaningless. In the face of that uncertainty, having a game plan and executing it is crucial, which is what all the campaigns believe they are doing.

But who would have guessed that Clinton would have avoided becoming the target in the final days in Iowa?

It has been long assumed that a victory here by the former first lady could start her on an unstoppable march to the nomination. In truth, the Democratic campaign has been surprisingly lacking in attack ads and negative campaigning. The Republican contest between Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney has become far more negative in tone than the three-way battle among Clinton, Obama and Edwards.

One reason is that the risks of launching attacks in a three-way contest are far greater than in a two-way battle. Another is that Iowans genuinely like all the Democratic candidates and aren't anxious to see someone begin tearing down the others.

Bill Clinton made that point again Sunday night when he spoke in Carlisle, Iowa, just outside Des Moines. He likes all the candidates, he said, but Iowans have to decide which of them they think would make the best president.

There is a workaday quality to the Clinton message -- to the messages of both Clintons actually. Call it bread-and-butter or kitchen-table economics, but the Clintons have never forgotten what got Bill Clinton to the White House.

What got them there was a relentless focus on the middle class and a list of programmatic solutions aimed at easing the economic anxiety that many Americans felt then and feel today -- and the Clintons are still focused on such concerns.

Bill Clinton spoke for an hour on Sunday night, weaving together his wife's accomplishments (with some embellishment) over 35 years and his own record as president. He talked for 45 minutes before he managed to get to his wife's years in the Senate.

His speech was laced with policy past and future (he described how he and his wife solved so many problems that it begged the question of why there is still so much left for a Clinton presidency to do).

Hillary Clinton is doing the same in her own way at stop after stop in Iowa, head down, avoiding the chattering class. "We're locked and loaded on our message," said Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director. "Other candidates are making news by attacking other candidates. They're going to run their race. The race we're going to run is focusing people on who's ready to be president."

Clinton took hits earlier in the race and suffered from her own missteps. She and Obama have sparred over the past week on the questions of experience and change. Obama has tried to engage her further but has been distracted by the rise of Edwards -- leaving Clinton largely free to move through the state without distractions.

Who would have guessed that the person everyone wants to beat in Iowa would be finishing 2007 this way?

By Dan Balz, The Washington Post, December 31, 2007