from CNN.com
The Iowa caucus is done. Romney has been elected King Corn, beating Santorum by 8 votes (25% each), with Paul coming in 3rd, at 21%.
The key takeaways from last night are, in my opinion:
- Perry is done
- Bachmann is done
- Gingrich has too much baggage
- We have a lot of Santorum crazy in our near future (sigh)
- …but if you ask me, Santorum is peaking just like Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and the others. Now that he has the country’s attention, he’ll plummet about 30 seconds after opening his mouth.
Now on to the links! Bernstein’s take:
What matters is the spin over the next few days, and it doesn’t seem to me that the exact order of finish will affect that very much. Media biases — in favor of new things, unexpected things, and for keeping the race alive — should all help Rick Santorum become the big story coming out of Iowa as long as he finished at least third.
Josh Marshall thinks Gingrich will stick around just to spite Romney:
Newt Gingrich. Newt looked tired tonight. He looked all of his 68 years. But through that he’s mad. And Newt Gingrich has a great capacity for anger. He says he’s going to keep fighting for the nomination. And at some level I buy that. But what seemed much more clear is that he has a new goal in this campaign, maybe in life:hurt Mitt Romney. That’s dangerous for Romney. There are more debates coming. Newt’s good at debates. And reporters love drama. That’s hazardous for Romney.
Eric Kleefeld notes that all of the campaigning, organizing, planning, and money spending Romney has done since Iowa 2008 got him…. 6 fewer votes than 4 years ago. This will probably serve to reinforce the narrative that Romney has a hard ceiling.
Andrew Sullivan live-blogged as the results crept in.
Whoever is driving Ron Paul’s twitter feed is kind of a dick:
Presumably, Ron Paul does not know who wrote this, and was unaware of it at the time.
Podhoretz, in an act of meta-meta-ness (uh, maybe?) tweets about tweeting about the Iowa caucus.
And Weigel makes an interesting catch:
Four years ago, a depressed GOP went to the precinct caucuses, very well aware that Democrats had all the energy. The total GOP vote: 119,188. This year, Republicans should be psyched about the chance to uproot Barack Obama. There will be something above 122,000 total votes. An improvement, right? Well… in 2008, 86 percent of the people who chose the GOP caucuses were Republicans. This year, 75 percent of the electorate was Republican, with the rest of the vote coming from independents and Democrats. What the hell happened?
The answer to that is, I think, relatively simple. The constant boom-bust cycle among the Not-Romneys coupled with Romney’s inability to break 20 -25% or so show that republicans just aren’t very excited about Romney, and they are desperately searching for alternatives. Each time they think they’ve found their guy, he implodes. So 11% of them just said the hell with it and stayed home. As for all those extra democrats and independents? That answer is really, really simple: Ron Paul.
Now on to New Hampshire
520 Chestnut 
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