DES MOINES, Iowa

I saw Mitt Romney’s hair move.

No really, I did. We were standing amid the soybean and corn fields in rural Iowa and a breeze lifted some of his salt-and-pepper mane out of its Brylcreem perfection.

The tenuous and scarce Republican front-runner, who hopes to do “darn well” in Iowa, was poking at President Obama. “I sure as heck wouldn’t be on a bus tour if I were president of the United States,” he said.

I tried to focus on his patter-on-a-stick in this rare encounter with the press, but I kept thinking about another tall, dark and handsome avatar of perfection known for holding back: Cary Grant. Like Grant, Romney is a fastidious dresser with an athletic build. But the 64-year-old former governor of Massachusetts doesn’t make you swoon, maybe because he looks like a statue of himself.

Grant came to mind because the setting for Romney’s press conference, outside the Vermeer agricultural manufacturing plant in Pella, recalled the famous scene in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”: Mad Man Roger O. Thornhill has to run for his life through Midwest cornfields when the bad guys chase him in a crop-duster. It’s an apt image for the riven Republican Party: Some maniacal Tea Party meanies fly in out of nowhere to spew poison, chasing the establishment guys out of their more refined natural habitats.