WINTERSET, Iowa Beyond the silos, down the street from the Rexall Drug, a few steps from the movie theater and the bakery, and hard by the Ben Franklin five-and-dime sits the Northside Cafe, with its nine wooden booths and its 15 shiny circular stools along the counter.
This noontime the hand-scrawled sign outside speaks of chicken-fried steak, butternut-squash soup, bread pudding, homemade desserts, hot drinks and Rick Santorum. The former senator from Pennsylvania won the 2012 Iowa caucuses and here, a classic Iowa small town surrounded by fields of political dreams, is just the sort of staging ground Mr. Santorum put to good use four years ago.
He pounded down chili in lunch spots like this one in towns like this one, and in many even smaller. He met Iowans in groups of four or five hard political work and in violation of every rule of efficiency and economies of scale. But he multiplied those single digits of listeners by hundreds of appearances, building a political force the old-fashioned way.
It worked in 2012, and now Mr. Santorum, with the loneliness of the long-distance runner, is trying it again.
