As you may have heard, thanks to an ongoing recount in Iowa, it's looking more and more like Rick Santorum may erase the 8-vote deficit that separated him from Mitt Romney in that state's caucuses, earning the former Pennsylvania senator the right to claim victory. Which would be neat, I guess? But at this point, surely no one is suggesting that this would be some sort of game-changing event, right, John Avlon?

This not only would rewrite the election history of 2012 to date—it would invalidate the oft-repeated line that Mitt Romney is the only candidate to win both Iowa and New Hampshire. It would stop the inevitability narrative in its tracks.

Whoa, whoa, hey now. "Stop the inevitability narrative?" Let's not get crazy, here. While it's true that a Santorum win would prevent Romney from being able to say that he was the historic double-winner in Iowa and New Hampshire, that's just a piece of historical obscuranta. It doesn't factor into Mitt's list of advantages. Let's recall that when everyone was convinced that Santorum was a narrow second-place finisher, his effort was largely blessed as a moral victory of sorts -- it demonstrated that in an era of wealthy campaign war chests and super PAC drone wars, there was still a place for that old-timey, door-to-door, lo-fi retail politics.

Santorum left Iowa on a crest of great press, and no one treated Romney's narrow victory as a significant accomplishment. And that's despite the fact that it sort of was -- let's recall that there were long periods of time during the summer and fall of 2011 where the Romney campaign publicly wrote Iowa off. It wasn't until it became clear that he might prevail as the Not-Romney field divided the vote that he decided to go for it, and to the end they essentially treated their good result in Iowa as gravy. Once you set aside all of the sentimental fuzz of Santorum doin' it old school, the fact of the matter was that Romney's half-hearted efforts in Iowa were sufficient to essentially tie a guy who'd spent the past year camping out in the Hawkeye State. Nevertheless, if you wanted to maintain the "vulnerable Mitt" narrative, you could: after Iowa, Romney was still "Mr. 25%" -- the candidate with a ceiling, the frontrunner who couldn't close the deal.

Except in New Hampshire, Romney did close the deal, and now he's staked out a front-runner position in South Carolina and Florida.

But, okay, Rick Santorum may end up the winner in Iowa. I still don't see how this "stopping the inevitability narrative" is supposed to work, exactly. Are we to presume that South Carolina voters would toss out all of their already formed opinions because Santorum transformed a narrow Iowa loss into a narrow Iowa win? That seems really dubious. Naturally, should Santorum or Newt Gingrich actually defeat Romney in South Carolina (and while this is still a stretch, there remains a possibility that Gingrich might pull it off), that would derail Romney's inevitability narrative. But I seriously doubt South Carolina voters are on pins and needles over the Iowa result. (I am not alone in these doubts.)

(Avlon's blow-by-blow of what's going on with the recount is well-reported and detailed, so go read the whole thing. This, however, was odd: "In addition, and somewhat bizarrely, the former governor of Louisiana, Buddy Roemer—who had dropped out of the GOP primary contest weeks before—received six votes." If Roemer dropped out of the GOP primary contest in December of 2011, that would be news to Buddy Roemer!)

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For all of last night's fireworks, the window of opportunity for any of Mitt Romney's rivals to knock him out of the top spot is basically closing fast. Let's consider a few data points.

Think someone will mount a stand against Romney in South Carolina? Think again. The latest Monmouth University poll puts it bluntly: "Romney poised to go 3 for 3." The top-line results tell part of the story: There, Romney has an 11-point lead over Newt Gingrich, his closest rival. But let's dig deeper:

Gingrich (30%) does best among those who call themselves very conservative, leading both Romney (25%) and Santorum (21%) among this voting bloc. But Romney does particularly well among voters who see themselves as somewhat conservative (39%) and moderate or liberal (38%). Gingrich also does well among those who say they strongly support the Tea Party movement -- a group that represents more than one-third of the likely electorate -- with 31%, to 29% for Romney. However, Romney bests Gingrich among those who support the movement only somewhat (39% to 17%) and either oppose or have no strong opinion about the Tea Party (31% to 15%).

It's hardly surprising that Romney fares better than Gingrich among those who are only "somewhat conservative" or who "somewhat" support the Tea Party. What's important is that even among those who strongly support both, he's hardly getting dominated. If the third of likely primary voters who strongly identify themselves as being with the Tea Party give Gingrich only a 31 percent to 29 percent advantage, then this segment of the voting population isn't worth talking about.

And whatever support Rick Santorum might gain from the semi-unified front of national social conservatives is obviously arriving too late, if it arrives at all.

Romney is crushing all comers in Florida. When Florida decided to buck Republican National Committee rules and jump the primary calendar to January, it gambled that its contest was going to end up being the kingmaker. It looks as if that gamble is going to pay off. Today's Sunshine State News poll has Romney staking a 26-point lead, and there's been little evidence of vulnerability.

Up until now, one way of arguing against Romney's inevitability was to point out how few delegates he's already won. But once Florida's primary is in the books, we start playing with some bigger numbers. The Florida primary's move to January came with a cost -- its delegation was slashed from 99 to 50 in punishment for FUBARing the primary calendar. But Florida's prize amounts to the winner taking all, so Romney is poised to bank a big number of delegates on his tally, anyway. The failure to blunt Romney's momentum has essentially given him a better chance of winning bigger shares of larger piles of delegates.

By the time we're through with Florida, it looks like that old criticism that Romney can't win the support of more than 25 percent of the field will have fallen by the wayside as well.

Romney's rivalry with rivals rivaled by rivalry between rivals. Sure, at times during last night's debate, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich went after Mitt, and the conventional view is that Romney was finally knocked back on his heels once or twice. This has led the Washington Examiner's Byron York to wonder if Romney will keep participating in these debates, to spend four more evenings taking shots and attempting to "run out the clock."

But what's the harm? As Jonathan Martin of Politico points out, as long as Gingrich and Santorum jockey between themselves to be America's Next Top Not-Romney, they're fighting a grueling battle with Romney tucked neatly in the background:

In what's shaping up to be the decisive primary of the GOP race, Mitt Romney has two unwitting allies: Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.

As they vie for the role of conservative alternative to Romney, Santorum and Gingrich can't help themselves from attacking one another, increasing the likelihood that the field remains too fractured to stop the front-runner from effectively claiming the nomination by notching his third consecutive victory.

And as I noted earlier, anytime that the debate conversation turns to Ron Paul battling the GOP establishment candidates over his unorthodox policy positions, Romney can put his hands in his pockets and enjoy the show.

Romney is now beating the Not-Romneys, anyway. The new Gallup Poll has Romney polling at 37 percent nationally among Republicans. Via Dave Weigel of Slate: "For the first time, support for Romney outpaces support for the three candidates running clearly to his right: Santorum, Gingrich, Perry. That conservative vote adds up to 33 percent."

But if the field got winnowed to just one of the Non-Paul, Not-Romneys, he would have a shot at defeating him, right? I'll confess that I've bought into the premise -- which I've borrowed from Rick Santorum -- that there is an "establishment primary" that Romney is winning, a "libertarian primary" that Paul is winning, and a "true conservative primary" in which the vote is getting divided up among Santorum, Gingrich, and Perry. The implication being that if all those votes could get consolidated around one rival, the lucky rival could potentially take Romney in a three-way fight.

Lynn Vavreck and John Sides, citing something I should have considered in the first place, says this premise is incorrect:

Why is the number of alternates important? Because many people are conflating two very different things: support for a candidate and disdain for another. Just because a voter prefers Rick Santorum for the Republican nomination does not mean that this voter would prefer any other candidate on the ballot to Romney. This false premise has led to a lot of faulty conclusions about Romney's support among the electorate.

In fact, Romney is the second choice of a quarter of the electorate who did not rank him as a first choice. Nearly 40% of Gingrich voters list Romney as their second choice. More than half of Huntsman voters do so.

This suggests that as the field narrows, Romney's support will grow, in contrast to the notion that the "anti-Romney" vote could coalesce around another, apparently more conservative candidate if there weren't so many conservatives in the race.

And this is just the evidence you pile up in advance of the contests that lie between Florida and Super Tuesday. Who's got the campaign in place right now to compete with Romney in Colorado, Nevada and Michigan? If you answered Perry, Gingrich or Santorum, you're wrong.

Miracle comebacks in South Carolina or Florida are still possible, I suppose. But it's a difficult haul. For Romney's rivals, a popular Dylan lyric sums it up: "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."

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At the top of Monday night's debate, Fox News' Bret Baier invited Twitter users to weigh in on the quality of each candidate's responses to the evening's inquiries, registering their opinion by using "#answer" and "#dodge" as hashtags to express whether or not they felt the candidates were shooting straight or avoiding the issue. And as we watched Mitt Romney finally take some sustained pressure from the rest of the field, we figured that was as good a metaphor as any. So our own Ben Craw ran with it, in a video mashup that puts Romney's game of dodgeball alongside the all-time greats at the game.

Romney's competitors managed to land some nifty blows on the frontrunner. Chief among them was Rick Santorum, who pursued Romney rather doggedly on the issue of voting rights for felons. But the way in which Romney glided around pointed questions was often more revealing. When asked as to whether he would be willing to release his income taxes, Romney unleashed a paragraph of dissembling as pure as ever did flow from silver tongue. When you have to worry about what your finances look like after you've boldly declared yourself to be an "unemployed person," though, you sort of have to duck and weave.

By the way, Romney's main weapon in the game of dodgeball continues to be Ron Paul. Whenever the conversation turns to Rick Santorum battling Paul over Paul's unorthodox positions, Romney can sit back and chill. Nevertheless, Romney spent more time in the hot seat last night than normal, and the conventional opinion was that by the end of it, he looked "rattled." If any of Romney's opponents had managed this feat in September, rather than waiting until January, they might not be losing to this guy.

With two primary contests in the books, we've arrived at the point where everyone has so much to say about so little and only a few more minutes before all of the major media organizations blow through the budget they've allocated for the entire pre-Super Tuesday calendar. But let's take a minute to size up your remaining GOP 2012ers and how their individual "paths to the nomination" stand.

MITT ROMNEY: It's kind of amazing that a thin win in Iowa, coupled with the blowout victory in New Hampshire that everyone had been predicting, could do so much to restore former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's inevitability, but that's the power of perception for you! It surely helped that right up to the eve of the New Hampshire primary, the fierce attacks that everyone was assured were sure to come from Mitt's rivals only materialized after the votes were counted and the scene switched southward. (And then, Mitt's chief tormentor, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, went a little bit crazy, but more on that later.)

Dave Weigel made a game attempt at "putting things in perspective" by pointing out that the number of delegates Romney had actually won could all fit in his car-top dog-defecation chamber, but let's face it, it's one thing for a political observer to urge restraint. The minute you hear that argument coming out of the mouth of an also-ran, you immediately recognize it as sucker's talk. The bottom line is that Mitt has the inside track to the nomination, a slight lead in South Carolina, a large lead in Florida, tons of money, the Not-Romney vote still getting split in multiple directions, and if no one manages to break his stride, soon he'll start gulping down heaping mouthfuls of delegates.

RON PAUL: If the first goal of Texas Rep. Ron Paul's campaign was to expand upon the support he'd gathered in 2008, then he can hang the "Mission Accomplished" banner. But it nevertheless feels like gaining the GOP nomination is going to remain just past his fingertips. Had he scored an outright win in Iowa, it would feel different. As it stands, Paul needs to either start grabbing some surprise wins, or at the very least, manage his caucus strategy to perfection. Even if he does this, it still may leave him short of the mark.

We don't doubt that Paul is trying to win. This week, he gamely demanded that all of the other also-rans quit the race and leave him to fight Mitt on his own. (A demand that was enthusiastically ignored.) But if Paul can't win this thing, his strategy seems designed to leave him in a position to extract concessions in return for his delegates -- in the form of platform or procedural changes. Naturally, his popularity has left alive the notion that Paul might do something unconventional. Will he, for instance, mount a third-party or independent run for the White House? Read on: we think we've found the answer to that question.

RICK SANTORUM: We accept former Pennsylvania's Sen. Santorum's premise that there are three mini-primaries going on in the large race: an establishment primary, a libertarian primary and a "classic" conservative primary. Santorum might be able to claim the third position and battle Romney and Paul in a long three-way contest, but he needs some help -- either in the form of everyone else getting out of the race, or that secret social-conservative confab deciding to swing behind Santorum and quickly outfit him with money, endorsements, air cover and footsoldiers.

Santorum is on an upward swing in South Carolina, and just might have enough time to notch second place. It will, in all likelihood, not be the close second-finish he had in Iowa, but it could be sufficient to chase some of his rivals from the race, leaving their votes for him to claim. Santorum is also in desperate need of real campaign funding and infrastructure. As it stands, the further he goes into the calendar, the less the "Rick Santorum campaign" looks like the work of professional strategists who've staked out the game in each state, and the more it looks like "dudes with Facebook fan pages."

NEWT GINGRICH: We understand that many observers consider Gingrich to have the better shot at second place in South Carolina, and thus could be the person who ends up achieving the best case scenario we describe for Santorum. And at the moment, he's a lot closer to Mitt in the polls than the former Pennsylvania senator is. We just feel that Santorum is doing a lot with very little and expanding his possibilities, while Gingrich's campaign grows more threadbare, frantic and desperate.

Besides, Gingrich's decision to nuke Mitt Romney by disseminating an anti-Bain Capital mini-documentary was a big mistake. The 30-minute movie, bought and unleashed via Newt's super PAC, plays like the album Occupy Wall Street would produce for Adele if she ever broke up with capitalism. Gingrich's conservative colleagues freaked out at the sight of the damn thing, and condemned Gingrich for making the Democratic Party's argument against Romney for them. The whole episode caused Gingrich to suffer a physiological experience -- a moment of self-doubt -- that's so rarely felt by the former speaker that there's no telling whether he'll be able to recover.

JON HUNTSMAN: Going into the New Hampshire primary, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman was the candidate who was supposed to be able to maximize his (strangely earned) center-left appeal, turn out different voter coalitions, and hold down Romney's win to single digits. But when all the votes were counted, Huntsman was proven to be the worst blowout-preventer since BP destroyed the Gulf of Mexico. Nevertheless, Huntsman put on an almost-convincing display of not-at-all-forced jubilation, declaring third place to be a "ticket to ride"...to South Carolina, where voters do not like him.

Huntsman's path to the nomination basically involves riding his motorbike to some town named "Nomination."

RICK PERRY: Why is this guy even still running? His path to the nomination involves a time machine and a cache of firearms.

BUDDY ROEMER: Buddy is struggling right now because none of the elite media want to invite him to debates to decry the influence of corporate money on politics, and his insistence on taking donations no greater than $100 is keeping him from dropping the super PAC bombs that everyone else is launching. It's a pity that the campaign with the most dignity is faring the worst, but we can at least re-extract an important lesson about American politics: If you don't sell out, get the hell out.

We warned you that watching this stuff up close was going to make you deeply cynical. Didn't we? Okay, well, we're warning you now.

So it's on to South Carolina, Florida and beyond. Mitt Romney is hoping that his "win quickly" strategy is back on track. Rick Santorum is hoping that he can prove by contrast that he's the more appealing candidate. Ron Paul just wants CNN to stay out of his way. President Obama's fending off a new book, Rick Perry's in a tiff with Sean Hannity, Jon Huntsman may lose to a teevee comedian in the days ahead, and one candidate's endorsement from a psychic monkey did not pan out like he'd hoped. To find out who, please feel free to enter the Speculatron for Jan. 13, 2012.

With two primary contests down, two things are clear about where Ron Paul's presidential candidacy stands. First, he definitely has managed to build on his coalition of supporters in the years since his 2008 bid. He doubled his number of votes in Iowa and more-than-tripled his support in New Hampshire. But the second thing we've learned is that this improvement, while substantial, is not looking sufficient enough to grab the nomination. While the possibility exists that his caucus state strategy might manage to pull a surprise or two down the road, Paul's main achievement in 2012 will likely be a slew of strong second- and third-place finishes.

But because Paul travels the country with an army of loyalists -- with young, enthusiastic voters swelling the ranks, dedicated to being a disruptive force in electoral politics -- speculation has mounted around the idea that he might run as a third-party candidate. Most of this speculation has little to do with the things Paul has done or said. In fact, he has repeatedly suggested that such a run isn't something he's particularly interested in doing. Despite the fact that he has many viewpoints that make him a pariah figure among the Republican establishment, Paul doesn't seem to want to quit the party. And, as Josh Putnam suggests, that long-game, max-out-the-caucus strategy of Paul's seems specifically geared to get to the end of the nominating process holding leverage:

First of all, the Paul folks are VERY organized. FHQ has something of an inside view of this. For months now, FHQ's 2012 presidential primary calendar has been used by at least two or three Ron Paul sites in either efforts to get the word out about when the various states are actually holding votes or in lengthy tutorials on how to become a delegate. These folks -- whether directly coordinating with the Paul campaign or not -- know the rules and are focused on what I call the back end of the process; the selection of actual delegates (not the binding of them).

Secondly, the business casual orders that came down the line within the Paul campaign to its young volunteers in Iowa hints at something bigger. The campaign, in other words, wants to appear to and actually be a part of an orderly delegate selection process, but a part that gets more Paul supporters a step further in the process in 2012 versus 2008. To the convention in Tampa.

[...]

We could conceivably, then, end up with an unknown but fairly sizable number of Paul delegates pledged to Romney or some other candidate in Tampa based on the rules in the various states. Romney in that scenario wins the nomination but the Paul folks become increasingly likely to hold some sway over some planks in the platform. [And just because, I'll add this: They may also influence the nomination rules for 2016.]

Still, because Paul hasn't denied wanting to mount a third-party run emphatically enough -- he has not literally opened an artery and agreed to swear out a ceremonial blood-oath, one way or another -- you can expect the speculation on this concern to continue, if not accelerate, in the days to come. When that happens, reach for this terrific piece from Buzzfeed's Rosie Gray, which in my opinion, puts the notion to bed, permanently. The key to this puzzle, Gray notes, is Rand Paul:

Rand Paul got something closer to a win when his father scored a strong second in New Hampshire, a high water mark for the family. It was a mark that, after decades of being a leading libertarian voice in the country and perennial candidate, Ron Paul had finally battled his way in from the fringe. In the last leg of his career on the public stage, he has broadened his support beyond the hard core, and taken advantage of the Tea Party moment to offer the most durable alternative to Mitt Romney’s Establishment Republicanism. After this presidential run, his campaign has said he’ll retire. And when he does, a generation of loyalists will need a leader.

[...]

In the meantime, the family’s dreams for Rand have created something else: A hostage. Terrified Republican leaders worry that Ron Paul will take his rowdy mix of Republicans and independents and run a spoiler third party campaign he hasn’t quite ruled out. Ron Paul, they are making clear, has nothing to lose – but his son’s career.

“The question of Rand’s future hangs over the 2012 race in a real way,” said John McCain’s 2008 campaign manager, Steve Schmidt.“If [Ron Paul] were to leave the GOP it would have a crushing effect on his son’s political career in the Republican Party and would be ruinous to any chance of a serious national campaign under the Republican banner.”

And while Ron Paul hasn’t ruled out a third party bid, his aides insist it won’t happen. Inside the Paul clan, Rand’s generation is rising, and the dream is a new kind of Paul campaign: One that’s dead serious, a tick or two closer to the mainstream, and one that wins.

This really boils down to whether you believe the point of Ron Paul's latter-day political activity is geared toward winning him a term as president or if his larger concern is building a sustained political movement. To my mind, it's the latter -- this will likely be Ron Paul's last go-round on the stage of presidential politics as a candidate, and if his movement can't get him the nomination outright within the GOP's primary process, then realism dictates it's not going to get him to the White House running as an independent.

And for all the hype surrounding Paul's history of seemingly quixotic bids for the presidency, I suspect that he's a good deal more practical-minded than he's given credit for being (the caucus strategy is indicative of this). And if Paul's thinking practically about the movement he's built, then he must be thinking that his son is the guy who can continue to bear the torch. Here's where Steve Schmidt should be heeded -- if Paul the Elder were to run outside the GOP, it would immediately sandbag Paul fils' senate career and set back the movement he's built.

So, if you had to bet, bet against a Ron Paul third-party candidacy.

READ THE WHOLE THING:
The Next Paul [Buzzfeed]

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When Newt Gingrich made clear that he was going to respond to getting constantly slagged by Mitt Romney's super PAC-funded attack ads in Iowa, Lord only knows that Gingrich had plenty of options.

He could knock Romney for innumerable flip-flops as he's pandered his way through his political career, telling whatever audience he was standing in front of what he thought they wanted to hear. He could tar Romney as the man who provided the vital DNA for the Affordable Care Act that all GOP candidates are required to abhor and vow to repeal, despite the sunnier disposition toward Romney's health care achievement in 2008. He could fillet Romney for being a conservative apostate -- he didn't merely run in a leftward direction in order to win the Massachusetts statehouse, he assured voters that he would be a moderating influence on the Republican Party, dragging the platform in a more liberal direction.

Indeed, at various times, Gingrich has fired shots at Romney, mining these areas and others in an attempt to tear him down. But what no one could have possibly expected -- and, judging from the reactions of conservatives, which I would describe as "mortal terror" -- what no one on the right could have possibly wanted, was for Gingrich to launch an all-out assault on Romney's Bain Capital roots, and eviscerate the candidate for being a predatory capitalist.

But that is exactly what Gingrich has done, and done with astounding thoroughness, by acquiring the rights to a 28-minute attack documentary that's come to be known as "King Of Bain." Made "by former Romney supporters," the result is a potent polemic -- combining Ken Burns' style, the darkness of the "Daisy" ad, and a bottomless reservoir of immutable rage -- that paints Romney as a dark-hearted, vicious-minded, boodle-craving technocrat-privateer. It very trenchantly depicts the lives of ordinary people faced with declining job prospects and mounting expenses. It decries the indifference of Romney's brand of capitalism, and puts a human face on income inequality. If you wanted to mount an argument against corporate personhood on the grounds that a corporation cannot have a moral compass, this will do the trick. In fact, if you screened this before an Occupy encampment, it would almost certainly draw a thunderous ovation.

And if you are a GOP strategist, hoping to reclaim the White House in 2012, that's the problem. Rather than assail Romney in the ways you would expect a conservative to do so during a presidential primary, Gingrich has jumped ahead of the process and grabbed the very argument that Democrats would have happily made to swing voters, and aimed it right at the GOP base. If we assume that Romney is the eventual nominee, then Gingrich and his super PAC, Winning Our Future, have saved the DNC and the Obama campaign a whole lot of time and money. And the attack has now forced Republicans to stand in defense of a specific form of predatory capitalism. Mind you, they're all for that particular form of predatory capitalism! But they don't enjoy having being made to defend it publicly, in an election year.

Let me briefly describe this video addendum to the Marx-Engels Reader that Newt Gingrich has made, for America.

Lights up on a shot of sky, clouds billowing, piano tinkling wistfully. The camera switches to generic depictions of industry and thrift as a voice-over narrator assures us that "Capitalism made America great" and has been a part of "American dreams." Yes, for as long as we can remember, there has been stock footage attesting to this, and a lot of it is in this movie. But in the wrong person's hands, we are told, "some of those dreams can turn into nightmares." Sudden percussion sound and a dark filter? Yep. Sudden percussion sound and a dark filter.

Clouds blacken, as the narrator calls out Wall Street raiders, enriching themselves at the expense of American workers. Those seamy Wall Streeters, we are told, were known for their greed -- "greed that's only matched by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits." Great line, by the way. "Vincent Van Gogh's painting talent was matched only by his ability to make beautiful paintings." "Scarlet's reddish hue was matched only by its crimson tint." The comparisons to the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street, right out of the gates, is apt, save for the commercial's ineptness.

Soon enough, we're introduced to the villain of this epic -- Mitt Romney, head of Bain Capital. His "mission," we are told, is personal enrichment, and we're introduced to random working-class types who attest to the fact that Romney doesn't care about the little guy. "But let's look deeper. Let's look deeper at his life," says one.

I predict that we are about to go deeper, and so we shall, taking a look at four instances of lives ruined by Mitt Romney and his insatiable quest to remodel his homes.

"For tens of thousands, the suffering began ... when Mitt Romney came to town." And that's the first twist. This movie isn't called "King Of Bain." It's called "When Mitt Romney Came To Town."

We are introduced, briefly, to Mitt Romney, his Harvard education, and his love for "stripping American businesses of assets" and "killing jobs." First stop on the road to ruin: Marianna, Fla. Here we learn about a local manufacturer of laundry equipment that got sold to Bain Capital. From there, everything went to crap -- production sped up, quality went down, pay slashed, stress mounted. In the end, we're told Romney "upended the company" and made big profits while "leaving behind a trail of wreckage."

But then Romney turned his sights on KB Toys and destroyed it in similar fashion. This ruined the lives of children. We know this because we see a child, staring into a television flicker, as the sounds of news reports of KB's demise fill the background. The look on the child's face says it all: "Oh no. The KB Toys chain is gone, and it was a brand with which I really identified." We learn that Bain reaped a 900 percent return on investment as 15,000 jobs were lost, which the Boston Herald says was "disgusting."

"Romney called it creative destruction," the narrator tells us. OK, but really, it was economist Joseph Schumpeter who called it that, but anyway! The ad develops the theme from there, defining "The Bain way" as profiting from the misfortunes of others.

We move on to DDi, a technology company that Bain was involved in, courtesy of disgraced Lehman Brothers. Bain, we are told, quickly fired workers, and just as quickly reaped the reward of an increased share value. But Bain dumped the shares, reaping profit, before the stock crashed, and DDI filed for bankruptcy. "Average investors without insider connections were left with huge losses," we are told, in a way that makes it sound like insider trading is some sort of virtuous pursuit.

The sticking point here is that Romney denied having anything to do with this particular pump-and-dump scheme, because he was off saving the Winter Olympics, but documentation proved this wasn't the case.

Finally, we go to Marion, Ind., "which used to be such a booming town ... but overnight it changed." We're guessing Bain was involved? Yes -- there was a paper company that ended up "on Bain's radar." The same story plays out -- workers cashiered, pay cut, quality diminished, wealth extracted, and lives ruined, as Bain pushed down on the throttle.

"Every night I listen to the news and I get very upset," says one Marionite. "Some nights it doesn't pay me to listen to it ... especially when a certain candidate for president, that ticks my ticker [appears]." (SPOILER ALERT: She is referring to Mitt Romney.)

The snows of uncertainty fall, as people drive off, into the distance, leaving their lives behind, borne back ceaselessly into the past, etc. Metaphorically speaking. Also, this ruined Christmas for some. "To Romney and Bain Capital, it was just another deal ... for others, it was a pit of despair."

One elderly woman sets up the final turn of the plot: "He's a money man, and he's going to look out for the money people. He didn't look out for us little peons ... so you put him over everything, then what? What's going to happen then?"

Well, the violins quicken to a frenzy and the voice-over testimonials grow to a desperate tone, and we're given a chance to imagine what a Romney White House would look like -- broken windows, lonely windmills, derelict buildings, a lone piggy bank falls and shatters. A crowd chants "Wall Street greed." The phrase "the almighty dollar" is spoken aloud with a disparaging snort. And not for the first time, you think, "Wait. This is being disseminated by a Republican?"

But it is, and it is unsparing in its criticism of Mitt Romney. In the world of this movie, Romney doesn't merely make money, he goes on a "cash rampage." He doesn't have colleagues, he has "hatchet men." And somewhere in the shadows of Bain, "wealthy Latin American investors" lurk, being vaguely "other."

And there is not a trace of American exceptionalism to be found in the video, because its makers have spared no effort to make Romney out to be a hyper-effete, itchy-palmed liege-lord, swelling above the peons with perfect hair and expensive suits. Romney speaks French. He has many homes. He's always at his happiest the moment one of Bain's downtrodden victims spills their sad story. Who on earth thought it would be a good idea to take a picture of Romney getting his shoes shined on a airport tarmac with a jet in the background? Don't know! (My bad, on second look, it looks as if he's getting wanded by security.) But Gingrich's pet filmmakers got that picture, and used it.

And they make great use of Romney's recent flubs on the stump. That time he calls himself an unemployed person? It's in there. His insistence that he knows how an economy works? You'll see it. But the clip that gets the biggest workout is the one where Romney attests that "corporations are people" because all the money a corporation makes goes to people. Again and again, the film deploys the end of that exchange, where Romney, over the objections and jeers of a critical crowd, sarcastically yells, "Where do you think goes? Whose pockets?"

On the off chance you're resistant to a filmmaker that beats you over the head, repeatedly, with an anvil, the answer they're reaching for is "Romney's pockets."

Again, wow: this is being distributed by a Republican, not a Democrat. Purchased by a Gingrich super PAC, not MoveOn.org. And it's not been slapped together -- real care and real research went into this. But while plenty of GOP establishment types have a range of negative feelings about Romney -- from distrust to derision -- it's perfectly understandable that they'd blanch at the sight of this video, and then become aghast at the way the Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman have followed Gingrich into this strange new encampment.

Rick Santorum, by the way, has stayed out of this fray. And Ron Paul has risen to Mitt's defense. And that tells you all you need to know about what motivates this argument in the first place -- it's the last resort of desperate candidates, who -- led by Gingrich -- have opted to set fire to the common rules of Republican Party politesse and a substantial portion of its codified economic worldview in an effort to prevent Romney from running away with the nomination. The only thing that separates Newt -- the man who's essentially responsible for this thing being out in the world -- and the candidates who have leapt onto this anti-capitalist bandwagon, is Gingrich's extraordinarily boundless need for vindication. This is the product of a man who now wants to destroy Mitt Romney so badly that he's willing to risk his own excommunication. (But he's now beginning to realize he may have made a mistake.)

The "King Of Bain" attack ads start hitting the airwaves tomorrow. Pop some corn.

[Note: To avoid any confusion, I'll point out explicitly that the summary of the mini-doc presented above is nothing more than a spot recap of the crazy montage of words and images that appear on the screen when you watch it. All claims made by the filmmakers should be treated as exactly that -- claims. Claims which do not exactly stand up to scrutiny.]

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Tuesday night, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney notched a large double-digit win in New Hampshire, showing few -- if any -- signs of the wear and tear he'd endured in the past few days on the campaign trail, and becoming the first non-incumbent Republican candidate for president to win both the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primary.

The victory came early -- immediately, in fact -- and Romney celebrated with a speech that, while lacking in personal charm, was a much more rousing, less-hectic oration than the one he'd delivered a week prior. It was hard to argue that his grip on the eventual nomination didn't grow more certain after last night.

Unless you asked his competitors! Yes, despite the fact that two contests were in the books and Romney's stock had risen considerably within a week's time, the field facing Romney -- having shed Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) after Iowa -- refused to winnow itself any further. Instead, the losing candidates, one by one, took to their lecterns to assure their supporters about how awesome their campaigns were going.

No, you wouldn't expect Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) to quit the race -- he placed third in Iowa and second in New Hampshire and has gamed out a long strategy with the caucus states that's designed to pull as many delegates as possible. Nevertheless, it's probably incorrect to say that he's "nipping at [Romney's] heels" -- as last night went on, Romney expanded his lead over the Texas congressman.

And you wouldn't expect former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) to drop out, either. He knows that the electorate in New Hampshire was far less conservative and far less open to his social conservative candidacy than the voters he found in Iowa. He'll want to put the new hope that Iowa bestowed on him to the test in South Carolina and Florida, where the conventional wisdom suggests he'll do better. But his momentum has been blunted by his tie-for-fourth finish last night, and the race is still clogged with candidates that are splitting the not-Romney vote up.

Meanwhile, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman got his New Hampshire surge, and it was just ... okay. Enough to take Huntsman from also-ran status to a third-place finish in the mid-double digits. For all the effort, he finished over twenty points behind Mitt. But you'd hardly know it from his post-game speech, where he proclaimed, "Third place is a ticket to ride!" Sounds neat until you remember he'll be riding to South Carolina, where he is polling behind Stephen Colbert.

And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) flamed out in New Hampshire as he did in Iowa, knotted in a distant fourth-place finish, with no real sign of viability and not much in the way of campaign infrastructure to keep moving forward. Still, Gingrich told his supporters that he's venturing on, describing his nomination prospects in the same terms as he'd described so many women who were not his wife -- "doable." It remains patently obvious, however, that the thing that drives Gingrich on is his animus toward Mitt Romney.

And that's basically the night -- a quick, boring result that all but cemented Romney's nomination, followed by a long litany of speeches where candidates of further and further diminished standing declared themselves the winner as well. At least we didn't have to watch Texas Gov. Rick Perry stand in front of a crowd and give his less-than-one percent draw the enthusiastic, fist-pumping celebration of his Iowa defeat. (Though if you bothered to ask him, he'd have told you he's doing just great.)

Our own Ben Craw has produced a highlight reel of last night's festival of unjustified optimism, so please enjoy.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated that Ron Paul has placed second in both contests. Paul placed third in Iowa and second in New Hampshire.

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When New Hampshire designed the quarter commemorating their state, they chose to venerate a much-beloved rock formation on Cannon Mountain that once overlooked the town of Franconia before it collapsed in 2003. Prior to its collapse, however, it was a well-known New Hampshire attraction because its craggy ledges, viewed in profile, resembled the face of a firm-jawed, resolute elderly man. Hence the popular nickname, "Old Man Of The Mountain."

It seems awfully fitting, then, that during last night's coverage of the New Hampshire Primary -- an affair that yielded a quick result, little drama, and few surprises -- the bulk of the excitement was delivered by two elder statesmen, former Granite State Gov.John Sununu and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who's been running with New Hampshire's "Live Free Or Die" motto since the start of his career.

Paul worked hard to steal his fellow contenders' thunder last night by opting out of the standard post-result speech and instead delivering a long oration on monetary policy and libertarianism, as if to remind his ardent supporters of the reasons they had chosen to cast their vote for him, just a few hours before he started talking. And Sununu stole the show on the pundit and commentary side, hurling crotchety quips and acid-laced barbs all around the MSNBC studio.

Our own Ben Craw has woven together the highlights of each man's night to form a sort of dialogue, in the hopes that we can convince Sununu and Paul to team up with former Georgia Senator and celebrated duellist Zell Miller for some sort of awesome septuagenarian buddy comedy.

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From the very first time Mitt Romney deigned to appear onstage alongside his competitors for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, it was hyped as a moment where Mitt would come under sustained attack.

Days before he alit behind the debate lectern, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty rolled out the first potent criticism of Romney's record, tying his CommonWealth Care plan in Massachusetts with President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act under the blanket term "Obamneycare." On the Sunday morning chat shows, Pawlenty seemed awfully proud of the appellation. But when he was asked to make the same criticism to Romney's face a day later, Pawlenty inexplicably chickened out. That basically put him on a glide path right out of the race.

Of course, Pawlenty would then become a Romney endorser and surrogate. But even in that role, TPaw was given to lamenting the fact that he got out of the race early. It's easy to see why -- in the days that followed, every single one of Romney's contenders got a turn to be the Next Best Thing in the "Not Romney" category. But another reason why is that his fellow contenders honestly didn't do a better job of taking on the frontrunner than TPaw did. As Jonathan Chait quipped, "Perhaps Romney has a force field that turns to mush the brain of anybody who threatens him."

That's actually one of the plausible explanations for why the coming attraction of the 2012ers ganging up on Mitt Romney never seems to actually come. And this weekend, really, was only slightly different. With the next primary in Romney's Granite State stronghold, the need to finally start acknowledging the mile-wide target that Romney has had on his back since June could not be forestalled any longer.

But even with the pressing need to drag Romney down, his rivals' investment in the task seemed tepid at best. Rather than a full-bore attack, the field very timidly criticized Romney for being timid. They very conservatively dressed him down for not being a great conservative. Rather than nail him on innumerable position switches, they chose instead to critique the vagaries of his career as a politician -- whom he ran against and whom he didn't and why and why not -- none of which matters a whit to anyone who's not a career politician!

Jon Huntsman got in one good dig and drew applause (which would have been great had he not poked at Romney for being the candidate of "nice applause lines"), but that's as rough as it got for Mitt. In the end, harsher attacks may not be necessary -- polls indicate that Romney's support has slipped a bit, perhaps because he's just as "meh" to the average voter as he is to the GOP establishment. That said, the word coming out of Iowa was that the candidates would be holding nothing back in their stand against the frontrunner. Honestly though, Scott Pilgrim had it a lot tougher, as you'll see in the latest video mash-up from our own Ben Craw.

[Video produced by Ben Craw]

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The real reason that we put up with the idea of the Iowa Caucus, despite the quadrennial concerns that it allows a few people from a small state to have an outsized influence on electoral outcomes (concerns which are somewhat overstated, but not completely dismissable!) is the simple fact that it is a really pretty thing to look at. For a few days in our lives, we immerse ourselves in the wonderment of seeing middle Americans, who we imagine are not far removed from the hard labor of working the soil for their daily keep (Iowa's population is largely urban, but we don't send TV cameras to those caucus sites), take those first fitful and uncertain steps in a long political process. They gather in community centers and school gyms and sit in folding chairs, and they use a pen to write a name on a slip of paper, and all is right with the world. Really right with the world! By the time everything is over in November, we'll have been exposed to every last dose of venality and cynicism our political culture has to throw at us, so we need this tonic, right at the outset, to preserve our constitutions from the coming toxins.

In exchange for this balm, we accept that the Iowa Caucus has a story to tell. The Iowa Caucus, we tell ourselves, may not be that great at picking a president, but it has a purpose to serve in winnowing down the field and eliminating those candidates who can't perform the basic tasks of retail campaigning. How did we do this year? Well, it winnowed out Michele Bachmann. It probably should have freed us from the further ministrations of the "Rick Perry campaign," but Perry has decided to soldier on. As Bachmann had already essentially eliminated herself from competition at the end of September, this seems a woefully inefficient way of getting a candidate to quit the race.

Nevertheless, Iowa generated something that felt like excitement, even if that hectic feeling was created by nothing more than two counties being dreadfully slow at counting. At the end of the night, three candidates claimed a sort of victory. Third-place finisher Ron Paul probably would have preferred to have ended the night much nearer to the leading vote-getters -- he really needed a first-place finish to prevent the media from dialing back their coverage of his campaign -- but he ended the night on an optimistic note, riding out of Iowa on a substantial amount of money and enthusiastic support, armed with a long-game plan to navigate his way to a high delegate count.

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, as you well know, battled to a photo finish, with Romney eking out a thin, eight-vote victory. But Romney couldn't claim the night. Not with Santorum's shoe strings-and-chicken bones operation nearly matching the Super PAC-enabled Romney vote for vote. Santorum, sensing that he was poised to claim something that would seem more like victory than the actual win, had a chance to capitalize on the moment and, as Rachel Sklar pointed out in Mother Jones the next day, he utterly nailed it:

Last night, after enough of a delay that pundits took note, Santorum took the podium for his speech and sheepishly apologized for reading from his notes. He proceeded to positively kill it. He spoke earnestly and with real emotion about his wife and family, his grandfather who had worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines into his 70s, and the American working class. He spoke of his daughter, born disabled with a life expectancy of just a year, who, against those odds, was now three years old; he spoke of another child lost, and of his passionate belief in the dignity of human life. His tone was strong, though at times wavered with emotion. He fed off the audience, acknowledging a zinger about Romneycare with a grin. He shouted out the New York Times for recognizing his Chuck Truck. He was humble, impassioned, patriotic, and filled with conviction. If you didn't know anything about Santorum before last night, you'd be impressed.

How could Romney have followed that? Well, the answer was pretty much "any way other than the way he did." When Romney finally took the stage, his speech had the tone and tenor of a man who was either in the throes of amphetamine mania, or was told seconds before going on stage that if he didn't finish within a certain time, someone, somewhere was going to start killing hostages. Romney paused for audience responses that never came, raced through his remarks at a breakneck pace and went back to his stump speech for that awful recitation of "America The Beautiful" that included his "corn is an amber wave" joke that never ever worked, as Stephen Colbert's brilliant next-day montage demonstrated:

Nevertheless, what's so bad about a little inability to seem human when your organizational strength and war chest dwarfs that of your next opponent several times over? Those are the challenges that Santorum has to surmount -- along with Romney's big lead in the upcoming New Hampshire primary -- which, again, is part of the important election year tonic: Dixville Notch! Hart's Location! Snow! Maple syrup! Live free or die! A reporter saw a moose!

And that's where this is all heading -- to the Granite State! There, Jon Huntsman lies in wait, hoping to remind people of his existence. Ron Paul rides a moneybomb wave, hoping to forge a deeper connection with New Hampshire's storied independents. Newt Gingrich -- barking mad at Romney for his vicious Super PAC attacks -- is threatening to rain down hellfire on the favorite. And there will be two debates in the 72 hours, including one at nine in the morning on Sunday, which is apparently sponsored by Satan. For everything you need to get caught up on the week that was, please feel free to enter the Speculatron for the week of January 6, 2012.

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The close second-place Iowa finish that has given Rick Santorum's candidacy new life may have been a victory for his low budgeted, four-aides-and-a-truck operation, but that doesn't mean that the former senator wants to maintain a shoestring operation as the presidential primary race takes him to New Hampshire and beyond. There was a reason why third-place finisher Ron Paul felt he had an advantage coming out of Iowa, and he made sure to cite it in his post-caucus speech: "You know we talk about it...you know, one of three tickets out, which is obviously true. And one of two that can actually run a national campaign and raise the money. But there's nobody else that has people working hard and enthusiastic and believe in something."

Which isn't to say that Santorum supporters aren't enthusiastic and have beliefs. But like it or not, money and manpower now matter a great deal. Mitt Romney obviously outclasses the field in terms of cash on hand and super PAC support (on the matter of comparing Romney's organization to Santorum, this political cartoon basically says it all), but Paul's no slouch -- his "moneybombs" are legendary for providing quick cash infusions whenever one is necessary.

Here, Santorum is playing catch-up with the new top tier. And he has a lot of catching up to do. For example, if we look ahead to the Michigan primary -- where Romney will play the heavy favorite -- what does Santorum's operation look like? Grand Rapids Press reporter Jim Harger says it looks like this:

Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum scored big in the Iowa caucuses Tuesday night. But his campaign for Michigan's Feb. 28 presidential primary has been limited to the Facebook Page managed by Grandville resident Peter Ackerman.

“I've been a supporter of Rick Santorum for a long time,” said Ackerman, a 34-year-old industrial supply salesman who became an admirer of the former Pennsylvania senator while growing up and living in the Philadelphia area.

But the Grandville father of two toddlers said he's not ready to leave his day job for the type of campaign Santorum will have to wage in Michigan to contend for the nomination.

Ackerman has no bumper stickers, yard signs or buttons to hand out. In fact, he's never been involved in a political campaign or the Republican Party.

For Ackerman -- who's not to be confused with the Peter Ackerman behind the shady and secretly-funded Americans Elect thingy -- Santorum support is "a hobby." And that won't get it done. Fortunately for Santorum, nothing succeeds like a little success. Jonathan Martin reported Thursday morning that Santorum has raised "over $1 million" in the first 24 hours since the Iowa Caucus -- most of it in the form of online donations. In fact, Martin reported that "the online traffic was so intense on the campaign's website that it crashed momentarily and prompted the campaign to switch servers."

And the Santorum campaign says that their operation may expand past the few dedicated staff and scattered hobbyists in a hurry:

On new staff hires to handle the bigger campaign, Santorum campaign manager says "my phone keeps lighting up." #iacaucus

-- Rosalind Helderman (@PostRoz) January 4, 2012

Of course, the biggest potential influx could be right around the corner. As noted Wednesday, next weekend, a gathering of social conservatives with huddle in Brenham, Texas, for an "emergency meeting" to determine which candidate they will throw their support behind as the official alternative to Romney. Santorum should be the natural choice, but there are complications, beginning with Newt Gingrich's decision to remain in the race, and, more significantly, the fact that Perry has elected to remain in and compete in South Carolina. As Martin noted, "Many of the individuals on the host list attended a previous closed-door session with Rick Perry this summer."

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The Iowa caucuses are perhaps better known as a contest that culls certain losers from a field of candidates than one that anoints the winner. But this year, the only casualty of the first big electoral test of the primary season -- besides the hours of sleep we lost waiting for Clinton County's returns to come in and whatever sense of dignity CNN's election team began the night with -- was Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who finished the night with only five percent of the vote. (The other poor finisher of the night, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, has opted to remain in the contest, presumably through the South Carolina primary.)

When Bachmann entered the race, she worked hard to establish herself as a candidate with serious presidential bona fides. She was a congressional Tea Party leader. A tax litigation lawyer. A member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Mother to an often indeterminate number of children. More importantly, she cast herself as the "tip of the spear" in the fight against everything about the Obama administration that bedeviled the GOP, most notably the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

Along the way, she distinguished herself with a colorfully loose grasp of historical facts and a tendency toward the hyperbolic. But on August 13, 2011, Bachmann notched a career milestone, becoming the first woman to ever win the Ames Straw Poll. She received 4,823 of the 16,892 votes, just pipping Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) at the post.

And ... that was about it for Bachmann. That same day, Rick Perry entered the race and that same weekend, Perry showed up in Waterloo and won over the attendees of the Black Hawk County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner while Bachmann stewed in her campaign bus. Over the course of the next few weeks, her displeasure with Perry intensified to the point where she started making outlandish claims about the HPV vaccine, which Perry had mandated be distributed to teenage girls in Texas in order to curb cancer. Bachmann confronted Perry on the issue at a debate, and later said she had met a woman whose daughter had been mentally disabled by the vaccine -- a claim that outraged medical experts.

Bachmann's campaign manager, Ed Rollins, who had previously vowed to impose a new discipline on Bachmann's public statements, had abandoned her by this time for a career in talking smack about her on cable news. Bachmann's entire New Hampshire staff followed suit in late October. Finally, her Iowa campaign chair, Kent Sorenson, defected to the Ron Paul campaign mere days before the Iowa Caucus. It was the final nail in the coffin of a campaign that had long lost its footing in the polls and the ability to finance a run beyond the Hawkeye State. Yet on the eve of the caucuses, Bachmann was still predicting a miracle, comparing herself to Tim Tebow.

The comparison was apt -- Tebow is suffering through his own collapse as the starting quarterback of the Denver Broncos. But at least he'll get to play in the postseason. Bachmann, after putting on a brave face the night of Iowa's decision, decided Wednesday to quit the race.

She leaves behind only memories, many of which have been collected in the above video, produced by our own Andrew Rothschild. So let's take a look back on the candidacy of Michele Bachmann. She managed to outlast Herman Cain and Tim Pawlenty at least, so there.

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If you recall, as far back as May of last year, various forces had begun to mobilize in the conservative movement to prevent Mitt Romney from winning the 2012 GOP nomination. As Jon Ward reported, this was a "top goal" of Freedomworks, "the nation's most influential national Tea Party group." It was also the top goal of quixotic Alaska Senate candidate and beard farmer Joe Miller, but no one took that particularly seriously for obvious reasons.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Iowa caucuses, however. Despite all of this mobilization and concern that Romney was not adequately conservative enough -- a viewpoint shared by plenty of folks within the GOP establishment as well -- none of these various armies arrayed against the former Massachusetts Governor actually...did...anything. Besides occasional complaining and occasional hoping for deliverance.

Back at the beginning of December, there were signs that the people who desperately wanted someone besides Romney to win might start doing something about it. The Hill's Molly Hooper reported that conservative "kingmakers" were "unhappy" about how the race was shaping up -- at the time, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was surging as the Romney alternative, and he turned out to be the one guy they despised more than Mittens. But time was running out -- the deadlines to get on the ballots for the early primaries had passed, and the second round of deadlines was looming. So there were rumors that some elite confab of conservatives might meet in some Papal conclave and choose a candidate out of the smoke. Erick Erickson of Red State yanked the relevant intel from from the Wall Street Journal's "Political Diary" newsletter:

Efforts are underway by some wealthy Republican donors and a group of conservative leaders to investigate whether a new Republican candidate could still get into the presidential race. The talk is still preliminary and somewhat wishful, but it reflects dissatisfaction with the two leading candidates, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

Conservative leaders are looking into whether it is feasible for a dark horse to get on the ballot in select states. The deadline to qualifying for the ballot has passed in Florida, South Carolina, Missouri, and New Hampshire. But a candidate could still get on the ballot in states like Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Michigan and Texas. At the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, voters write in their choice, so there is no formal filing deadline.

But once again, nothing seemed to come of this, and I'd all but figured that the moment to move with determination against Romney had passed. Apparently, I was wrong, because here's the news today, from Jonathan Martin:

A group of movement conservatives has called an emergency meeting in Texas next weekend to find a "consensus" Republican presidential hopeful, POLITICO has learned.

"You and your spouse are cordially invited to a private meeting with national conservative leaders of faith at the ranch of Paul and Nancy Pressler near Brenham, Texas, with the purpose of attempting to unite and to come to a consensus on which Republican Presidential candidate or candidates to support, or which not to support," read an invitation that is making its way into in-boxes this morning.

As Martin reports, this new gathering is being hosted by social conservative luminaries like James Dobson and Gary Bauer, the clear implication being that a champion must be selected from the Santorum-Perry-Gingrich ranks to take on Romney directly, because the three-way splitting of the vote is making Romney's path to the nomination easier to traverse.

The problem, of course, is that last night's contest only managed to winnow Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) out of the running. Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) spent the night "reassessing" his campaign, leading many to believe he might quit while he was not ahead as well. But a morning tweet from the Perry camp signaled that he would press on to South Carolina.

Gingrich of course, shows no sign of quitting the race either, which presents an interesting dilemma for this social conservative confab. As Steve Benen notes, "Gingrich has never gotten along with Dobson," which suggests that former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has the inside track to winning over this group's favor. But with Gingrich chafing at Romney's numerous super PAC attacks and signaling that he's prepared to go all "V For Vendetta" on Mitt, the anti-Romney forces could not have a more determined ally in their War On Romney than Gingrich.

Which means this latest attempt at marshalling the forces of darkness against Mitt might end up like all the others -- bogged down in indecision.

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So, with the Iowa caucuses in the books, our attention turns to the matter of who "won" last night. Technically, the "winner" is Mitt Romney, who eked out a plurality of the votes cast, by an eight-vote margin. But, as many are noting, Rick Santorum was perhaps the biggest "winner," relatively speaking, because his bare-bones, on-the-cheap retail operation came within a hair of besting the big-spending, Super-PAC enabled Romney. And of course, Ron Paul, who doubled up his 2008 total but only managed a third place finish, was nevertheless acting like a winner last night as well.

And yet, this was an election that was decided by a teensy fraction of the available humans in Iowa who could come around and cast a vote last night. This year's Iowa Caucus is being billed as one of the best ever -- a record turnout, in fact. But if last night was a record turnout, then the Iowa caucuses are some sort of "tallest hobbit" contest.

The numbers tell the story: of the 2,250,423 voters in the state (using the higher voting-eligible population), only 147,255 came out last night. And of those, only 122,255 voted in the Republican contest, for a turnout percentage of 5.4 percent. And if any of the hype about Democrats, Occupiers, Anarchists, interlopers, and stray ACORN activists (those that haven't been secreted off to Bagram Air Force Base for indefinite detention) -- all voting on the GOP side to gum up the works -- is true, it's possible that there was an even smaller percentage of sincere GOP voters.

And former Massachusetts Gov. Romney won by 8 votes, a percentage of the voting population that even Wolfram Alpha cannot calculate into a percentage that my mathematically-challenged mind can handle.

So, it's a good thing we made such a big deal about last night's events, right?

But if the true winner of the Iowa Caucus only seems uncertain for those reasons, then you don't know the half of it. See, the real winner of last night's caucuses is really revealed by the number of delegates that were awarded to each candidate. And as it stands right now, everyone is technically in a three-way tie, with zero delegates for everyone.

This is not to say that various experts haven't weighed in with various projections. According to our Associated Press-enabled sidebar, Romney is projected to take seven delegates, and former Sen. Santorum (R-Pa.) six. But Iowa doles out 28 in total. Where do the remaining delegates go? Well, depending on whose projection you're seeing, they could be going in many directions. Last night, a CNN chyron suggested that Romney and Santorum would split the lion's share of the delegates between them, leaving Rep. Paul (R-Texas) with a token three or four. But Larry Sabato predicts that when all is said and done, it will look more like an even split, by thirds, among Romney, Santorum, and Paul.

Over at The Green Papers, where these matters have been covered since the beginning of time (and whose creators have steadfastly refused to bring their site design out of the mid 1990s), they suggest an even wider split, with Romney, Santorum and Paul taking six delegates each, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich snagging four, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry pulling three. The remaining three delegates, rounding out the 28, are the "the National Committeeman, the National Committeewoman, and the chairman of the Iowa's Republican Party," who "will attend the convention as unpledged delegates by virtue of their position."

Right about now, you may be asking, "Wait, 'attend the convention?'" Yes. This is where we really get deep into the part of the Iowa delegate selection and distribution process that's not sexy enough to be covered on television.

While what we witnessed last night, with all the voters meeting in gymnasia and writing their votes on slips of paper to be counted by party officials, is billed as "The Iowa Caucus" and disseminated to the viewing public with patriotic fanfare, it was actually just step one of a long process (that will last until June), known as the precinct caucuses. The delegates from these caucuses will go to 99 county conventions in March, where delegates will be elected to attend Iowa's Congressional District Conventions and the State Convention.

The Congressional District Conventions are in April, and, per The Green Papers, "the sole business -- insofar as the presidential campaign is concerned -- of the District Convention is that of instructing the delegates to the Iowa State Republican Convention from the counties making up said congressional district as to the presidential contender most preferred by the delegates in attendance at the District Convention."

Finally, on June 16, Iowa's State Republican Convention is convened, and the 25 delegates to the Republican National Convention are elected. (Again, The Green Papers details the arcane process through which all of the various delegates get selected.)

Now, as Chris Good points out, we probably will be able to put this entire ornate process on fade if we get one or two solid contenders to emerge out of the early state primaries:

All this will be moot if a front-runner sprints ahead of his competition in the next two months. But we’ll have to revisit the Iowa outcome, in a delegate-counting context, if the GOP race progresses into a dragged-out trench war.

GOP presidential candidates may find themselves tussling over delegates deep into the spring as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did in 2008, if Republican Party officials have their way. New party rules, adopted in June to mimic the Democratic system that prolonged the 2008 Obama-Clinton battle, have prodded most states to allocate national-convention delegates proportionally, in some form or another, placing a higher priority on organizing across the country and potentially meaning a longer journey to the nomination.

[...]

If the 2012 primary becomes a race for delegates, Tuesday night’s vote will mean less, and winning Iowa could come down to organizing at and before those conventions in June. If the race is still competitive as June draws near, Iowa GOP officials will start to talk more about the votes for delegates.

So, the reason you won't hear much talk about the delegates that Gingrich and Perry might be eligible for is because neither candidate is expected to remain in the race long enough for it to really matter. But the guy who might stick around is Paul, and, as many are pointing out today, his long-view of the caucus process is part of his overall plan to persist in the race. As Paul's senior campaign advisor Dan Godzich told Business Insider's Grace Wyler: "Part of what we've been training the Ron Paul people to do is not to leave after the vote ... Stay and get elected to the conventions and get us those delegates."

Josh Putnam, who cranks out solid intel on the primary process on the daily over at FrontloadingHQ, delves deeper into Paul's strategy:

First of all, the Paul folks are VERY organized. FHQ has something of an inside view of this. For months now, FHQ's 2012 presidential primary calendar has been used by at least two or three Ron Paul sites in either efforts to get the word out about when the various states are actually holding votes or in lengthy tutorials on how to become a delegate. These folks -- whether directly coordinating with the Paul campaign or not -- know the rules and are focused on what I call the back end of the process; the selection of actual delegates (not the binding of them).

Secondly, the business casual orders that came down the line within the Paul campaign to its young volunteers in Iowa hints at something bigger. The campaign, in other words, wants to appear to and actually be a part of an orderly delegate selection process, but a part that gets more Paul supporters a step further in the process in 2012 versus 2008. To the convention in Tampa.

[...]

We could conceivably, then, end up with an unknown but fairly sizable number of Paul delegates pledged to Romney or some other candidate in Tampa based on the rules in the various states. Romney in that scenario wins the nomination but the Paul folks become increasingly likely to hold some sway over some planks in the platform. [And just because, I'll add this: They may also influence the nomination rules for 2016.]

But let's not get too bogged down in Paul's endgame, which has a steeper hill to climb with a third-place finish than it would if he'd won last night's vote count outright. And let's leave off some of the Santorum hype for the moment as well -- Romney will enjoy a run of favorable state contests in Nevada, Colorado, and Michigan that might firmly establish his inevitability no matter how things go in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida.

The point is that you should take all talk of "winning" and "losing" with several grains of process. And more importantly, while Iowa's divine-right to being the first contest in the primary season is often criticized for having an outsized influence over the rest of the selection process, the truth is that the later primaries actually greatly influence who ultimately reaps Iowa's rewards -- which don't amount to very much.

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