Some thoughts on the results from the Iowa Caucuses

Well, an 8-vote margin of victory, and some of the strangest concession speeches in the history of politics: What an interesting night!

Unless I'm mistaken, what I heard last night from Newt Gingrich during his ‘concession’ speech was that Rick Santorum doesn’t have the money or campaign infrastructure in place to deal with the Romney-Machine that took Newt down. Furthermore Santorum’s benign demeanor and debate abilities (His toughest attacks seem to be along the lines of “I think you’re wrong”) is just not on the level of Newt Gingrich’s matter-of-fact statements and overall bombast.

So, Newt has basically declared that at the next debate, “I will kneecap Mitt Romney in order to allow Rick Santorum to gain more traction before his inevitable showdown with Mitt somewhere in South Carolina and Florida.”

Newt is going to allow Rick Santorum to continue to stay above the fray while he continues to distract Romney and suffer the penalties of running a negative campaign. This, for the lack of a better term, makes Newt Gingrich something of a debate mercenary –Perhaps a whole new job market will open up for practitioners in this field; people who cannot win themselves but are terrific debaters and can help decide the actual winner.

My guess is that Newt Gingrich would have welcomed a continued rise to the nomination and potential presidential showdown with Barack Obama, but from the outset I don’t think Newt’s primary goal was to become the President of the United States. Much like Herman Cain and Donald Trump, Newt’s presidential run seems more bent on increasing his financial portfolio.

Perhaps Newt’s new decision to become the GOP debate mercenary is his way out with reputation not only intact, but enhanced? Perhaps Newt was looking for his “Ross Perot” moment, where he could sabotage his own campaign without really looking like he was sabotaging his own campaign?

Some random thoughts on the other Iowa Caucus participants:

·         Other than being a strict social conservative, what is Rick Santorum’s baggage??? He is really only loathsome to single-issue voters as far as I can tell.

·         Mitt Romney and Ron Paul both have very noticeable ceilings.

·         BUT, if we were to give Ron Paul’s campaign to former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson (a true Libertarian) Johnson would have received 35% of the vote last night and gone on to win New Hampshire. South Carolina is a different story…

·         John Huntsman over-performed. After basically giving Iowa the middle finger, Huntsman still managed to tally 1% of the vote!

·         Rick Perry is one of the worst publicly-elected speakers I have ever seen.

·         Wherever the planet is that Michele Bachmann spends most of her time on, it seems like it’s a happy place; she is ALWAYS smiling!