Iowa Post-Mortem

I stayed up just late enough last night to watch a furnance-faced Mitt Romney speed read through a speech like a coked up version of the guy who recites the legalese at the end of a 30 second radio ad for a car dealership. Except, unlike the ad guy, Mitt was really bad at it. At one point he attempted, for whatever reason, to add in a few lines from America The Beautiful but ended up slurring something about "amber waves of rain" before getting on to the MSRP part.

Mitt's a pretty wooden actor so it's difficult to know if he was exultant or just pissed but there can be little doubt he wanted the room to know he was excited. And why shouldn't he be? Here's Mitt leaving Iowa with an ever-so-slight 8 vote win over Crazy Hopeless Alternative Candidate Of The Week Rick Santorum which entitled him to.. well actually just 13 of 25 delegates.

But, on the other hand, Iowa was supposed to be the phase of the primary where the turbulent anti-Mitt imperative coalesced around a spokesperson with a legitimate chance at denying him the nomination. Instead it flirted with a series of laughably non-viable alternatives in a desperate game of spin-the-bottle which happened to be pointing at Santorum on the day the caucus was held.

Don't worry. It won't stay there long. Santorum's "victory" speech was maybe even funnier than Romney's. Not only did he have to suddenly pretend that he had been doing and saying things in Iowa all this time that anyone had paid any attention to, but he had to do it with that icky smirk on his face. You know the one that says to the world this is a man deeply conflicted over whether to be a corrupt douche or a sanctimonious weirdo from one minute to the next? Yeah that one. Expect to hear a lot more about that between now and the time Santorum becomes completely irrelevant again. Probably Saturday.

Meanwhile former Crazy Hopeless Alternative Candidate Of The Week Michele Bachmann is finally out. For a while last night it wasn't clear what she was going to do. At one point she said "I am not a politician" and then moments later insisted to supporters that she was not dropping out of the political campaign she had been engaged in since last summer. And then today she's gone.

But if last night's results are any indication no one will notice. Bachmann's poor performance, most perturbingly, screwed up my projected numbers. Because Bachmann, Roemer, Huntsman, and the remnants of Herman Cain couldn't combine for more than 5% of the total, there was far more Crazy vote out there to spread between Santorum and Paul than I expected. Also note that even though 123,000 Iowa Republicans is a ridiculously small number of voters for us to be giving all this attention to, it is also a record high turnout for a GOP caucus. More highly motivated Crazy Caucus Goers than at any time in history were on hand last night, they were less divided than they could have been if Bachmann still pulled any interest at all, and, even still, Mitt finished first.

So Bachmann's departure shouldn't affect Mitt's ability to fend off the Crazy vote in future primaries. And now that Rick Perry has apparently decided not to go back to Texas and secede from the race, the Slightly Less Crazy Anti-Mitt vote he split with Newt in Iowa will probably split again in South Carolina.

Restless GOP voters may not have much confidence in Mitt but the rest of their field is a mess. And now, because of the long experience in Iowa, they know it. I'm sure there's still some time left for one half-hearted feint at a stand in South Carolina but after that, don't expect there to be much sport left in this race.