He's counting on a strong finish in the Jan. 24 caucus

                By Zack Van Eyck
               Deseret News staff writer
       Call him Don Quixote, call him an asterisk, Sen.Orrin Hatch doesn't mind.  What's important to the dark horse presidential candidate is what you call him days from now when the Iowa Caucus is over.
        Descriptions like "serious contender" or "rising challenger" would be fine with Utah's senior senator. He would also like a call and pledge of $36. He has secured that amount from about 15,000 "skinny cats," as he refers to his grassroots supporters, and has now raised $2.5 million for his underdog campaign.
        Hatch is confident you won't be calling him "former presidential candidate" after the Jan. 24 caucus, despite the most recent Des Moines Register opinion poll that shows him trailing the other five GOP candidates with only 2 percent of the vote. (That is, Hatch points out, a 100 percent improvement over his 1 percent showing in the previous poll.)
     A powerful, 23-year member of the U.S. Senate, Hatch is up against the longest of long odds in his bid to supplant Bill Clinton in the White House.  But the 65-year-old member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fully expects
to surprise the "liberal" national media, Utahns and the rest of the country with a strong finish in Iowa, the first major event of the primary campaign. And he intends to follow it up with a solid performance in the New Hampshire primary Feb. 1. Then, Hatch predicts, his campaign coffers will swell and the media will begin to take him more seriously. And from there, the sky
above California — and the other 10 states holding March 7 Super Tuesday Primaries — is the limit.