By comparison, Al Gore didn’t even come close in Florida.

Dec 4, 2012
WSJ

By JAMES TARANTO

Bye-Ku for Michele Bachmann

     She of “crazy eyes”
     May be crazy like a fox
     News contributor

A Win-Win Election
One thing is clear after last night’s Iowa Republican caucuses: The goody-two-shoes platitude that “every vote counts” is bunk even in an election as close as this one. If you’re an Iowan and you failed to vote, it just means that Mitt Romney outpolled Rick Santorum by eight votes rather than seven or nine–and if you preferred someone else, your failure to show up didn’t even affect the margin of victory.

Still, it was one heck of a close election. As we were tweeting about it, we also flipped through the TV channels and discovered Current TV, or, as it is commonly known, The Network Keith Olbermann Left MSNBC For. Olbermann wasn’t on last night, though. Instead we saw Al Gore, the former vice president, on a panel with some Turkish dude and quinquagenarian Canadian-American ex-beauty queen Jennifer Granholm. Later it occurred to us that George W. Bush’s margin in Florida in 2000, 537, was two orders of magnitude greater than Romney’s in Iowa. Before all the recount shenanigans it was three orders of magnitude greater.

We suppose one way you can tell a close election is that election night (or the early hours of the next day) features an even number of victory speeches–zero in 2000, two last night, both before the final count was in but after it was clear it would be a photo finish. Santorum went first, and he seemed more triumphant than Romney, which is to be expected. Merely by emerging as a serious contender, the former Pennsylvania senator had exceeded almost everyone’s expectations.

Whereas Santorum appeared confident, and spoke from the heart, Romney seemed to be trying hard to connect and to provide a rationale for his campaign–and when you seem to be trying hard, it means you’re trying too hard. Of course the results last night were themselves confidence-building for Santorum, but perhaps the difference in their attitudes was a cause as well as an effect of the Iowa results.

There was plenty of drama in the speeches from the losers as well–except for Ron Paul, who finished third. As one would expect, he essentially congratulated his followers for having made their point, which was all he and they could have expected in the first place.

Rick Perry, who finished fifth, seemed resigned as he announced that he would return to Texas to assess whether there was a way forward for his candidacy. It was a sharp contrast with sixth-place Michele Bachmann, who spoke as if she still expected to face Barack Obama in November.

By today, however, the two had switched positions, with Bachmann dropping out and Perry announcing that he is still running. The Texas governor “called Iowa a ‘quirky place’ with ‘a quirky process,’ ” the Associated Press reports. “He said voters in South Carolina share his values and that he feels confident he will do well there.” South Carolina votes Jan. 21, which is 11 days after next week’s New Hampshire primary.

Newt Gingrich appeared bitter and angry after finishing a distant fourth. “So furious was Gingrich that, in addressing supporters, he refused to mention Mitt Romney by name–he referred to him merely as ‘a Massachusetts moderate’–and strongly hinted that he would arrive in New Hampshire with fangs bared and claws slashing,” reports the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach. As Gingrich groused about the unnamed moderate’s negative ads, we kept waiting for him to use the phrase “mindless cannibalism.”

According to Achenbach, however, “this morning a mellow, uncaffeinated Gingrich showed up in an overcrowded meeting room” in Concord, N.H., where “he reserved his political attacks for President Obama.” At a news conference “less than an hour later,” though, Gingrich was back on the attack against Romney.

For the moment, it appears as though the two new front-runners are each in a functional alliance with one of the remaining also-rans. The longer that both Perry and Santorum are in the race, the more likely it is that Romney will still end up winning by default. In particular, by doing well in South Carolina, Perry could make it hard for Santorum to build on his near-victory in Iowa.

For Gingrich, it appears to be personal. He praised Santorum yesterday as he denounced the moderate who must not be named, and commentators speculated that the former speaker was setting himself up to be the ex-senator’s hatchet man. We know from his years as House minority whip and from the 2011 Republican debates that Gingrich can be very effective in this role. But in those cases, his targets were also his party’s foes–Democrats and the liberal media. It remains to be seen if he is as effective at fighting within his own party.

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