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-point 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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There's only a few hours left before the Iowa caucuses, which means in a few hours, the Iowa Caucuses are going to happen. Time for stressed out candidates, left to marinate over the holiday weekend in the brine of their own uncertainty, to play what is called "the expectations game!" Who thought who was going to win in Iowa? Well on Monday, Mitt Romney was in Marion, confidently predicting that Iowa would anoint him and send him on to the nomination:

"You guys, I need you tomorrow night," he told more than 600 people packed into an asphalt company’s truck garage. "I need every single vote in this room, and I need you to get a couple of other votes in your neighborhood, get them to caucus. I need a great showing here in Cedar Rapids. We’re going to win this thing with all our passion and strength and do everything we can to get this campaign on the right track to go across the nation, and to pick up the states and to get the ballots I need and the votes I need to become our nominee."

Or did he? Apparently, when Romney said that he was "going to win this thing," he wasn't actually talking about the Iowa caucuses, but some other, less well defined "thing." Politico, in updating their own post on Romney predicting a win, says that the concepts of "thing" and "state" is a "a distinction that comes with a difference." Is it though? Because if so, it would be great to know what "thing" Romney needs the help of Iowans to "win" so that he can "become our nominee." Especially if that "thing" is not the Iowa caucuses, because right now, a whole ton of reporters are in Iowa under the assumption that the Iowa caucuses are that "thing."

Romney's pulled back further still in the meantime, saying that he'll "be among the top group."

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, whose time atop the polls in Iowa turned out to be even shorter-lived than those who had come before him, was sounding a more downcast note at the same time Romney was being prematurely upbeat:

Newt Gingrich says he doesn't expect to win Tuesday's Iowa caucuses after being battered by millions of dollars in negative ads.

Gingrich told reporters Monday that the "volume of negativity" by his rivals and their allies had done its damage. He then went on to say: "I don't think I'm going to win."

But today, Newt is walking that back as well:

So, as best as I can explain it, Newt Gingrich The Analyst thinks Newt Gingrich The Candidate is doomed because of all the negative ads that have been run against Newt Gingrich The Candidate. Newt Gingrich The Candidate, by contrast, thinks that Newt Gingrich The Analyst is full of it, and could still win. We'll have to wait to hear what Newt Gingrich The Historian has to say about all of this, but I'm guessing that Newt Gingrich The Historian will look back on Newt Gingrich The Candidate's time in Iowa as a time that exposed how awful the political discourse has become because of unlimited corporate money in politics.

(Later, Newt Gingrich The Historian will be challenged to "seven three-hour Lincoln-Douglas style debates" by Newt Gingrich The Supporter Of The Citizens United Decision.)

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In the clearest sign that all of the reporters in Iowa have run out of local Iowa culinary fare to take Instagrams of and are now just bored in the waning hours before caucusgoers actually start voting, Rick Santorum is now getting a lot of attention for -- uhm ... wearing sweater vests. Yes, that's right. The New York Times insists that Santorum's sweater vests are "turning heads."

I suspect, however, that his vests aren't so much causing heads to swivel as much as they are receiving attention from reporters who are staring right at the candidate, and thinking, "Wow, covering Rick Santorum is pretty much what we expected it to be like back when we weren't covering Rick Santorum because we weren't taking him very seriously. Where's the shining, bouncing ball with this guy? Let's just say it's his sweaters." And now, Santorum's sweaters are receiving more coverage than, say, the homeless population of Des Moines.

All of this began when Santorum wore a sweater vest to a forum hosted by Mike Huckabee, where everyone else was wearing a suit, and someone created a Twitter account called @FearRicksVest. Then two weeks passed with no one remarking on any of this until Karin Tanabe wrote an item about it for Politico's "Click" section. We made a joke about it in the Speculatron, figuring that would be the last anyone would talk about it. But we were wrong, because yesterday, The New York Times decided they'd own this story.

And they've given a lot of thought to the variable utility of certain styles of sweater:

Crewnecks, with their neck-hugging collars, aren’t suitable for stuffy rooms crammed with voters who have little respect for personal space. Cardigans? Not his thing.

Mr. Santorum prefers the sweater vest, that sensible, traditional choice of grandfathers and college football coaches. He owns them in navy blue, gray and tan, which he sported here on Monday for a voter meet-and-greet. Sensing they were seeing a political fashion statement in the making, members of his staff recently ordered vests embroidered with the Santorum campaign logo.

The Times goes on to blow the lid off the story that other candidates have worn different clothes, at different times in American history.

We've since learned, in a followup "Click" item, that Santorum wears the sweater vests because he thinks it helps him look like "an elder statesman." As Politico reports, "Santorum, 53, pointed out that a man in Iowa guessed he was 32." Humblebrag!

At any rate, the original report on Santorum's sweater vests also noted that he has an affinity for turtlenecks, so there's a potentially equally irrelevant story in Iowa that the media are just ignoring.

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The Iowa caucuses will be getting underway in just a few hours, and normally, as events speed themselves toward the conclusion of a thing, one expects bewilderment to fade and for a certain amount of well ... certainty to start to congeal. But this is Iowa, in an election year, and the whole point is that you are not supposed to have any clue about what is going to happen. Don't let so-called experts make you feel bad for feeling out-of-the-loop as they casually make predictions, either! They don't have the slightest idea what's going on, either.

Look, as near as we can tell, when all is said and done on Tuesday, the winner will be Mitt Romney, or Ron Paul, unless it's not, in which case, it will be Rick Santorum. Or possibly Newt Gingrich. If Newt doesn't finish dead last, that is! Which would mean Michele Bachmann wouldn't finish dead last. Which would be a positive, and unexpected result that might give her flagging candidacy "new life." Unless it doesn't. Also: Rick Perry! He could do well, unless he does poorly. In either event, he has more money and campaign support to keep pressing ahead, so Perry might have a stronger candidacy that Newt or Bachmann even if more people vote for the latter two. Get that? Because I sure don't!

Pop quiz! If Rick Santorum wins Iowa, who does this benefit the most? The answer, believe it or not, is Mitt Romney. Probably.

Okay, let's say Romney and Paul take the lion's share of the vote and finish one-two or two-one, and then, say Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich all finish with numbers in the mid-teens -- for example: Santorum 17 percent, Perry 15 percent and Gingrich 14 percent. Who finished third in Iowa? As it happens, in the past, we've seen fifth place finishers characterize their fifth-place finish as a "a three-way split decision for third place." So, if you answered, "They all did," then you are 100 percent correct, (unless it turns out you're wrong).

Did you know that Sarah Palin fans in Iowa are planning some desperate, Hail Mary maneuver to get her nominated? It's true! They call themselves "Sarah Palin's Iowa Earthquake" and they are encouraging Iowans to "Vote Rogue on January 3rd." Does this mean that these folks will gather at caucus sites, literally cast votes for "Rogue," making it so Anna Paquin's character from the X-Men movies finishes fourth in Iowa? Your guess is as good -- and as bad -- as mine.

And, in truth, your guess is just as good as any of the pundits and flacks who have taken to your teevee to tell you what they think is going to happen in Iowa. Don't believe me? Well, our own Ben Craw has made a new mashup video of everyone doing their best to tell you what is going to eventually happen in this long, drawn out fight for what will turn out to be an astoundingly small number of delegates, relative to all the nonsensical fuss we made over the damn thing.

So don't worry about it. Chill out. Feel good that you are at the same exact level of political sophistication as everyone else, and that's okay. There's only one person who we can say with 100 percent certainty will not win in Iowa, and that person is, of course, Dick Gephardt.

[Video produced by Ben Craw]

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This is our last Speculatron Slideshow of the calendar year, everyone. When we next have the opportunity to relate all of the week's campaign highlights, the Iowa caucuses will have happened, actual primary voting will have commenced, and delegates will have been assigned to a few lucky GOP contenders. Some will "have their ticket punched" to New Hampshire. Some will lay claim to [ENTER LAST NAME HERE]-mentum. And one or more will have called it quits and said some awfully nice things to the frontrunner, hoping to perhaps be considered for the V.P. slot, or have some campaign debt offset in return for an endorsement.

But most importantly, we will finally be discussing the "2012 race" in a year that's not actually "2011." This has always been a little strange, we know! So, in the spirit of the New Year, we'll leave you with an ever so brief recap of what's already happened.

When you get right down to it, the 2012 race pretty much began the morning after the 2010 elections ended, but the real action didn't get started until mid-spring, when Fox News scheduled the first of what would turn out to be several thousand candidate debates, some of which looked as if they might end in actual bloodshed or something akin to that scene in Scanners where that guy's head explodes. The candidates present at the contest were Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain, and Gary Johnson. Slim pickings, but more than a few pundits imagined that they might be looking at a future winner of the Iowa Caucus. (None likely realized at the time that the candidate they had in mind was Ron Paul, however.)

Eventually the field of candidates began to swell. Michele Bachmann joined the fray, gunning for an Iowa win. Mitt Romney jumped into the race, and eventually proved impossible for Tim Pawlenty to confront, face-to-face. Newt Gingrich ended his interminable dithering with the idea of running for president, and, after many false starts, finally got a handle on it and jumped in. He then went on vacation, and his entire staff quit on him. Also, Jon Huntsman decided that he, too, would run for president, for some reason.

But the people who seemed to matter the most in the early part of the campaign season were often those who were opting to not run for president. Mike Huckabee, who was considered a heavy favorite, opted to stay on at his Fox News show. The appealing Mitch Daniels declined a run after getting a taste of what the grueling slog might do to his family. John Thune bowed out, because of the book "Game Change," and its sexism. And the oddest non-candidate of all was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. He kept telling reporters "No," and those reporters, like date-rapists, kept hearing "Yes." Eventually, Christie had to hold a press conference in which he repeated his intention to not run for a solid hour, until everyone in the room was weeping.

Donald Trump ran a fake campaign for president! Remember that? Mark Halperin, long after the rest of the world was laughing at this fake campaign, said things like "I think he’s much more serious about running," and "I don’t know why he would have gone through hours and hours of meetings if it were all just a charade," and, in an example of what low self-awareness gets you, "if you’ve got the ability to manipulate the media ... you could imagine a scenario of getting in late and riding a populist wave to the Republican nomination." Ha, ha, ha, people should remember these things that Mark Halperin said.

Sarah Palin also, famously and predictably, did not run for president. Though she did successfully stage a fake campaign bus tour that ... uhm ... took "hours and hours" of planning and "manipulated the media." Heh. She eventually bowed out on Mark Levin's radio show, earning her a scolding from Roger Ailes, who hired her as a Fox News contributor for the precise reason that he wanted her to do her in-or-out routine as an exclusive to his cable network.

The Ames Straw Poll happened! People rode buses to a parking lot at Iowa State University and ate deep-fried, fully be-sticked food items. Tim Pawlenty finished third, quit, and became a Mitt Romney surrogate who walked around lamenting leaving the race so soon, which is not very surrogate-y! Michele Bachmann won the straw poll, edging out Ron Paul, and immediately took a dive in the polls, because that's when Rick Perry entered the race. Then Rick Perry took a dive in the polls when everyone learned that he couldn't count and had the propensity to make odd noises when he was supposed to be forming sentences.

Then Herman Cain rose to front-runner status, on the strength of his basso profundo profundities and his ability to say the word "nine" over and over again, whenever he was stuck for needing to have something to say. Eventually, however, he took a dive, due to a combination of his handsy-lady problems and "Uhh, Libya, what is that now? I know this! Uhhh. Ummm. Freeen."

And so Newt Gingrich became the belle of the ball, despite all of his vacations and his lack of campaign staff or infrastructure, and this time we all thought, "Okay, this is maybe the guy who will rise as the challenger to Romney." That was before the entire conservative establishment unleashed the hot flames of Hell upon Gingrich, and Romney and Paul used their actual campaigns and their actual money to mount a slew of negative attacks on him, driving his poll numbers back from whence they came.

So now it's looking more like Mitt Romney -- the robot who had all the luck -- and Ron Paul, who is again surviving a flap over old crazysauce newsletters that went out into the world under his name, and maybe ... just maybe ... Rick Santorum, who gets to start his own upward climb into the boom-and-bust cycle at the precise moment he needs to. And at the margins, we still have various excluded candidates, like Gary Johnson, Buddy Roemer, and Fred Karger, who are switching parties, building movements, and/or making their last stand.

Also, Jon Huntsman. Still doin' some stuff somewhere, probably.

That's where we leave things at the end of this year. One of these people -- or more! -- will challenge the incumbent, President Barack Obama, for the White House in 2012. The Obama reelect team is clearly betting on Romney. Will they be right? For the non-Romneys, there are still obstacles to surmount. This week, the Bachmann campaign suffered another round of quit-fits. Newt Gingrich compared his ballot access woes to an American tragedy. Buddy Roemer finally got added to some polls. Huntsman mocked some corn-pickers, Perry got lost on the 45th parallel, Santorum's wardrobe choices got a moment in the sun, and one of our lucky contenders received the coveted "my life would suck without you" endorsement from an unlikely source. To find out who, please enter the Speculatron for the week of December 30, 2011, and we'll see you next year!

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In the latest campaign ad from Newt Gingrich, God of Carnage, the former House Speaker says that "we can create millions of jobs right now." Is this to be achieved by Gingrich hiring one million people to manufacture and market "Ellis The Elephant" merchandise? Because I'm just just trying to plan my next couple of days around Gingrich solving the crippling unemployment crisis in the next few hours or so:

Okay, so, not exactly. Gingrich will create a million jobs by "repealing laws that raise taxes and strangle businesses" (despite the fact that such be-strangled businesses don't seem to exist), "cutting taxes" (which is another way of saying the first thing he said), and "unleashing the power of our energy industry." (I'm guessing that means "cutting taxes" and "repealing laws," as well.)

Also, there's a blink-and-you-might-miss-it graphic in the ad noting that Gingrich won the endorsement of "the architect of Reagan's economic plan," a reference to Arthur Laffer, who bestowed his blessing earlier this week. And if you're reading between the lines, here, maybe Gingrich's plan for "job creation" is the one that Laffer touted earlier this year in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, in which he suggested that "enterprise zones" be created in inner-cities, establishing a bunch of mini-Saipans within the United States where all of the labor practices we've come to know and enjoy would be suspended: no payroll taxes (and big giveaways to corporations whether they headquartered in the "zone" or not), no minimum wage, no union organization, and no "codes, regulations, restrictions and requirements" that "unjustifiably impede economic growth" (or, in other words, no codes, regulations, restrictions or requirements that keep laborers alive). Profits earned by those who don't have to live in these laissez-faire hellscapes would be taxed at a discount, of course.

This was the secret scheme that Herman Cain came up with when he had to make his 9-9-9 Plan less onerous on the poor after the whole "poor people would buy used products" to avoid the new 9 percent sales tax was deemed to be too hilarious by reporters. I also suspect that it's a thing you have to be "for" in order to get Laffer's endorsement. So, if you personally feel that the unemployment crisis in America has been caused by a dearth of Triangle Shirtwaist Factory calamities, Gingrich is your man.

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Ever since Newt Gingrich capitalized on the episodic collapses of his fellow rivals for the GOP nomination to briefly rise into contention as the Not-Romney candidate du jour, George Will has been using his syndicated column as a one-man war blog against the former House speaker, warning that Gingrich is a dangerous, bomb-throwing egomaniac who doesn't care what parts of the conservative movement are damaged by his pyromaniacal tendencies.

At some point in the past few days, some of this must have rung a bell with Bob Woodward, because on Christmas Eve, he published a remembrance of the 1990 budget battle between President George H.W. Bush's administration and Congress, which briefly led to an October shutdown of the government. Definitely go read the whole thing, but if you've no time to spare, Brad DeLong helpfully distills the important details:

Days earlier, Gingrich had dramatically walked out of the White House and was leading a very public rebellion against a deficit reduction and tax increase deal that Bush and top congressional leaders of both parties -- including, they thought, Gingrich -- had signed off on after months of tedious negotiations. ...

[Office of Management and Budget Director Richard] Darman called Gingrich. ... Gingrich told Darman "you've got to go" and said that he wanted Bush to be defeated. Gingrich did not dispute Darman's version of the conversation, but he said he later told him that he had changed his position and did not want to knock off Bush. "I am a loyalist," Gingrich said, adding that he worked hard for Bush's reelection in 1992. ...

Darman asked [Rep. Vin] Weber to mediate. ... "It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life," Weber said, "because I never intended to be either a psychiatrist or marriage counselor. And the sessions were very much of that magnitude. They both should have been laying down! I had this very strong sense that I was dealing with a couple of people that had grown up without any friends ... a couple of kids that were the smartest kids in their school class but nobody liked them."

Weber said the two did not have real discussions or disagreements about policy. ... "I got pretty bored with it all, to be candid, sitting there listening to these guys talk about, you know, 'Well I thought you liked me, if you liked me, why did you say that about me?'" Weber said. ...

"I know Newt didn't want Dick Darman to resign," Weber said. "Newt wanted Dick Darman to sit down and spend hours and hours talking with him. And set up a process of communication that would make sure that everybody knew that, you know, Newt had Darman on the phone any time he wanted him and had his ear on anything he wanted to." Weber portrayed Gingrich in various ways throughout the 1992 interview, at one point calling him "a high-maintenance friend and ally, needy" and at another saying that "Newt, as you know, views himself as the leader of a vast, national interplanetary movement."

Somewhere, George Will is saying, "Told you so," but the larger question is the one that DeLong asks, which is, basically: Why didn't Bob Woodward report this years ago? As DeLong notes, Woodward's 1992 account of the budget fight characterized Gingrich as just a major player in what amounted to "bipartisan opposition." The antagonism against Bush and the bizarre account of how Gingrich wanted to wrap Darman into his "interplanetary" cult of personality didn't make the cut. It seems unfair to take the Democratic opposition to that budget -- which was rooted in policy principles -- and suggest that it had equivalence with Gingrich's solo operation into megalomania, but that's precisely what Woodward did in 1992.

Woodward is likely to get credit for some exquisite timing, especially in light of Gingrich's new interview with Matt Bai, in which he casually remarks that he's a threat to the GOP's "old order." As Alec McGillis recalls, this is the position Gingrich defaults to when his electoral chances are threatened: His backstabbing of Bush in 1990 was basically the same play call Gingrich is making today when he compares being left off the Virginia primary ballot to Pearl Harbor.

But seriously, what was Woodward saving this two-decade-old reportorial tidbit for, exactly?

RELATED:
Bob Woodward Tells Us Now What He Knew About Newt Gingrich Two Decades Ago [Brad DeLong]
What Bob Woodward Left Out [The New Republic]

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The New York Times, which has been following presidential hopeful Mitt Romney around on the campaign trail, published a dispatch today on the way his 2012 campaign seems to be a "carefully crafted do-over" of his 2008 campaign. You may have already noticed that this time out, Romney is no longer running strong on having conceived and enacted an innovative health care reform program while he was the governor of Massachusetts -- now that his idea has been co-opted by the Obama administration, his Commonwealth Care has become something like the bathrobe from those Abilify commercials, an awkward burden he has to carry that makes him sad inside.

But that's not the Times' chief concern. Instead, the paper has a long and exactingly detailed piece on the many firmware upgrades that have been made to Romney's user interface:

A close-up study of Mr. Romney’s casual interactions with voters captures a candidate who can be efficient, funny and self-deprecating, yet often strains to connect in a personal way.

Yes, the recently launched Mitt Romney update is a candidate that features an enhanced mode of communication, in which he reads voters' visages, notes the way they interact with other people, and then starts guessing their ages and relationships as a means of breaking the ice. In case you missed this when Dave Weigel wrote about it in June, here's how it works:

“Sisters?” he asked. (Nope, stepmother and stepdaughter.) “Your husband?” he wondered. (No, just a friend from the neighborhood.) “Mother and daughter?” he guessed. (Cousins, actually.)

The results can be awkward. “Daughter?” he asked a woman sitting with a man and two younger girls at the diner in Tilton, N.H., on Friday morning. Her face turned a shade of red. “Wife.”

Oh, Mr. Romney said. “It was a compliment, I guess,” said the woman, Janelle Batchelder, 31. “At the same time, it was possibly an insult.”

For Romney, it's a process -- specifically a process that's governed by millions of carefully executed neural subroutines. And as Romney processes the information in his environment, he fills the spare seconds with stray facts (“We stayed in the Courtyard hotel last night...[i]t’s a LEED-certified hotel,” says Romney, apropos of nothing), awkward laughter ("Ha-ha," says Romney, adding, "Ha-ha."), a new default greeting ("Congratulations," he says, about everything) and a carefully calibrated set of physical reactions to greeting human beings:

Mr. Romney, never much of a hugger or backslapper, stands with his hands straight down at his waist, tilting forward ever so slightly and turning from side to side as he searches for the next hand to shake or poster to sign.

I was sort of hoping for details on the precise angle of the tilt and the full radius of Romney's new swiveling capabilities, but I guess that's closely guarded proprietary information. Nevertheless, this Times piece is perhaps the closest examination of the new Romney's technical specs that we have on offer, scooping many of America's premiere gadget blogs.

Perhaps the best new feature that Mitt Romney offers is that he will now perform useful calculations for the people he encounters.

But his inner wonk has at times endeared him to potential supporters, as it did at a farm supply store in Lancaster, when Mr. Romney began discussing the intricacies of cow milk with Jessica Hebert, an Obama voter who was at the store.

Mr. Romney delved deeply into the topic, with real curiosity and a barrage of questions, after Ms. Hebert, who has shown dairy cows, explained that a prize animal produced about 100 pounds of milk a day. He began a series of rapid-fire calculations to determine how many gallons are in a pound: “Eight-point-three pounds per gallon. So 8 into 100 is going to be about 13, 14, gallons. Oh, 12 — there you go.”

So, Mitt Romney is like Siri, in that he is friendly in aspect, answers simple questions, and probably will not direct people to any nearby abortion providers.

READ THE WHOLE THING:
The Retooled, Loose Romney, Guessing Voters’ Age and Ethnicity [New York Times]

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We'll be home for Christmas, as the saying goes, but sadly, our heroic 2012ers -- still foraging for votes in the wilds of Iowa -- won't be able to say the same. Back when this whole shebang began, the candidates might have been able to look ahead to this week in December as a time when they could all pause, take a few cleansing breaths, spend a holiday weekend nestled in the bosom of family and Yuletide cheer, and gather a second wind for the New Year. But as the chaos of the primary season calendar shook out in a way that bounced the Iowa Caucus to Jan. 3, there's no sleep till Sioux City.

So it's hardly been an off-week for the GOP presidential hopefuls. Just ask Newt Gingrich, who got to spend a second week listening to the news herald the collapse of his support in Iowa, and the thinning of his national lead over Mitt Romney, which two weeks ago was making headlines and heads spin across the media landscape. Since his ascension, Gingrich has been the target of a full-out assault from establishment GOP types, from the entire staff of the National Review, to syndicated columnist and eminence-grise George Will, who seems to have a bottomless supply of venom to spit in Newt's direction. But in Iowa, Newt's downgrade has most likely come at the hands of his rivals -- most notably Ron Paul and Mitt Romney (and his super PACs!), who have mounted a considerable air war against the former speaker of the House.

Of course, here's where we see the liabilities of having a rickety campaign infrastructure come into play. When Gingrich lost his entire campaign staff to -- well, to his decision to constantly be on vacation -- he brushed it off, bragging about how his campaign was going to be a different model. But it seems that running a social media campaign in virtual reality isn't yet a good enough idea to supplant campaign traditions like having "campaign offices" with "telephones." This week, Gingrich had to stop campaigning in Iowa in order to travel to Virginia -- where he lives -- to get on that state's ballot at the last minute. Meanwhile, the whole world laughed as the NewtGingrich.com domain -- which would normally be seized by a competent campaign -- directed visitors to all sorts of embarrassing locations.

His plan, it seems, for this stage of the contest, was to try to get his rivals to go along with running a positive campaign, free of criticism. Romney and Paul have not obliged him, and now Newt's left to yell about how unfair it is that everyone gets to hide behind their super PACs -- an unusual circumstance for a guy who championed the infamous Citizens United ruling. And for everyone who theorized that the endless debates of 2011 were what was keeping many zombie candidacies on their feet, Gingrich is confirmation. And he seems to know it, too. This is why he badly wanted that Donald Trump debate to go forward on Dec. 27. And it's why he is trying to bait Romney into participating in his continual fetishization of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. "Won't you please agree to come be a part of another televised display of forensics, which are the only hope I have of making up for my lack of campaign infrastructure?" asks the Gingrich campaign.

"Ha, ha, no!" says the Romney campaign, and smartly so. This week, Romney started to take back the mantle of inevitability he'd ceded to the Gingrich surge. And he managed to regain his footing even after chickening out of taking a position on this week's big political debate over the payroll tax cut extension. It wasn't all sunshine for Team Romney however -- another shifting stance, this time on the Iraq War, provided critics with plenty of late-season attack fodder.

Of course, the immediate beneficiary of Gingrich's collapse may be Ron Paul, who is suddenly appearing atop Hawkeye State polls and is now being touted far and wide as the odds-on favorite to prevail in the Iowa caucuses. But it's come at a cost, as a perennial controversy -- his age-old Ron Paul newsletters, for years packed with incendiary, nativist garbage -- have swung back into the newscycle on the strength of a Jonathan Chait column. And Paul, despite having more than three years to develop an answer to this age-old mess, hasn't come up with anything that settles the issue.

Paul and his most ardent supporters continue to insist that it's old news, that Paul has voiced strong support for various civil rights heroes and that his policy portfolio is precisely the sort that enfranchises and supports many historically denigrated constituencies. But they all miss the point by a country mile. The reason curiosity persists over these newsletters is because Paul demonstrates a complete lack of curiosity or interest over how it came to pass that such nonsensical, divisive bilge got disseminated in his name in the first place. He just does not seem to care, and it makes little rational sense. As Dave Weigel notes, he's "blowing it":

But Paul isn't giving an answer on the newsletters that could possibly end the story. He's annoyed about being asked uncomfortable questions? Who cares? News flash: The media doesn't just want to run fun pieces about how great your best ideas are. No one, in any kind of public life, could get away with publishing content under his own name then saying he had no idea who wrote it. He obviously has some idea. Will he have to admit that he's still friends with the people who wrote it? Will he have a story about how he ostracized those people? Either one of those admissions would answer the questions.

Of course, I think Weigel would agree that maybe Paul figures he can skate on this, because there's no sign that any of this controversy is hurting him in Iowa. Though there's no evidence that he'd be damaged by making a chapter and verse explanation of how it came to pass that this content was distributed under his banner, what Paul did -- if anything -- when he found out about it, who -- if anyone -- was taken to the woodshed by Paul over the matter, and what steps -- if any -- Paul has taken or will take in the future to ensure it never happens again.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, the long moribund campaign of Rick Santorum is finally starting to show some momentum. Last week, we wondered why influential Iowa social conservative Bob Vander Plaats hadn't just given Rick Santorum -- the best avatar of the beliefs enshrined in The Family Leader's "Marriage Vow" -- his endorsement a long time ago. It's been obvious for months that Santorum was their guy, and finally, Vander Plaats came around to that realization. Of course, Santorum could have used the endorsement weeks ago. Making matters more complicated are a pair of controversies that have come attached to Vander Plaats' blessing: a report that he bestowed his approval on Santorum in exchange for a monetary supplement, and another report that he'd urged Michele Bachmann (who we're no longer able to pretend is anything more that a 2012 footnote) to quit the race. Vander Plaats denies both charges, but the candidates say otherwise.

And Rick Perry isn't going away either. If Gingrich needs the debates to survive, the lack of debates has allowed Perry to campaign on his own terms, and, combined with all of the volatility on the top tier, it's created a small opening. His campaign seems to understand that this is it, now is the time, and he's being touted as a guy who you might want to get behind if you want to take a gamble. In Iowa, Perry's back to double digits, and is widely seen as the guy who'll benefit if the top tier collapses in a heap of unfulfilled expectations. (He still can't quite escape his tendency to gaffe it up, however: This week, Perry gave a statement on the death of "Kim Jong Two.")

Jon Huntsman is, essentially, the Rick Perry of New Hampshire. He managed to leave a good impression at the last few debates, forsaking the grunge-era jokes for substance, and ably presenting himself as the "adult in the room" -- mirroring the technique that his old boss, President Barack Obama, has taken in Capitol Hill debates. He's suddenly in reach of the top spot in New Hampshire, and depending on how roiled the race gets coming out of Iowa, he may have an opportunity of his own. He's milking all the "Let's give Huntsman a second look" chatter, and is doing to Romney in the Granite State what Romney has done to Gingrich in Iowa -- blast him mercilessly. For his effort, this week Huntsman earned the endorsement of the Concord Monitor.

At the bottom of the rankings, the candidates who have been largely frozen out of the discussion are still making moves of their own. If Ron Paul is reaping the benefits of many years building the foundation for a unique constituency, Buddy Roemer may be doing that now. His hopes of achieving the nomination remain dim, but this experiment of his is roping together a Paul-like movement of disaffected types who might put aside their traditional opposition to create a cross-pollinated movement of Occupy Wall Street types, Tea Party originalists, and good government/campaign reformers who have looked for a hero and found it in Roemer and his "let's start here, let's start now" campaign. If he misses his shot at the nomination this time around, there's a movement for Roemer to lead, if he wants it.

If Roemer is looking to a future allied coalition, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson is opting to retrench and get back to basics. This week, all those hints that he might quit the GOP finally yielded to a decision to join up with the Libertarian Party and run under its banner. Johnson now has new hoops to jump through, and he'll do it with a party that would probably prefer to net Ron Paul as its standardbearer. That would make for an excellent debate, by the way, between Paul -- who's never had to account for the cost of his views as one congressman among many -- and Johnson, who actually had to fuse his philosophies with the requirements of having an executive position in New Mexico.

Fred Karger, like Roemer and Johnson, has no room for error in his all-retail, all-the-time campaign in New Hampshire. And unfortunately for Karger, he made what might be a fatal error this week when he opted to put up a sponsored website making fun of Mormons for, in his words, their "crazy beliefs." Here, Karger gets back to an animating issue -- the Mormon influence over the Prop 8 debate, and his belief that Mitt Romney, as a national leader, could have gotten the Mormon church to stand down from the fight against gay marriage. We've long been amenable to his sunny, positive campaigning -- in a cynical year, it's been a tonic. And we've always been curious as to how Karger's fervent support for the LGBT community might shake up any of the debates in which he's been denied participation. But this latest move is ill-advised, undermines the entire non-divisive spirit of his campaign, and we just can't cotton to it. It's a bad move, and it has not been received well.

Finally, we have President Obama, who is back to having a decent week politically -- his stance in the battle over the payroll tax cut extension led to a week-long media cycle in which the GOP was largely cast as a comical band of infighters. Obama's approval ratings during this time swelled back to the sort of level that makes you a viable candidate again. Now, the only extant question is whether or not voters will remember this week in 11 months' time, when it really counts, and if the economy will continue demonstrating some health.

Normally, this would be the time that we'd be inviting all of you to get into the Speculatron slideshow for even further details, news and analysis, but this week, we've decided to give the heroic editors who tame this beast on a weekly basis the chance to knock off early and get their Christmas celebration started. And we hope you do the same! If we could get you, our readers, anything for Christmas, it would be a switch we could flip so that the 70 percent of you who are dreading the coming campaign season wouldn't dread it so much. As we can't do that, please take our best wishes and our sincere thanks to you for tuning in each Friday.

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Yesterday, presidential hopeful Ron Paul had an exchange with CNN's Gloria Borger (I believe the go-to descriptor we're using these days is "testy") in which the Texas Congressman, weary of answering questions about the newsletters filled with racist/homophobic/xenophobic goulash that were published in his name many years ago (content Paul has, at various times, denied being the author of and, at other times, denied having knowledge of) removed his microphone and withdrew from the interview. At the time of his walk-off, Paul had one thin sliver of a point to make -- Borger was essentially re-asking questions that had been asked by her CNN colleagues days earlier. So if we want to call it a protest against CNN having nothing new to ask about the matter and asking it anyway, that's fine, let's call it that.

But, hey, in the interest of having something new to say on the subject, here's Ed Morrissey with the latest video scoop from C-SPAN archive-diver extraordinaire Andrew Kaczynski -- a circa 1995 interview with a then-out-of-office Paul, in which he discusses how he's staying involved in the political world. (The salient part begins about a minute into the video.)

Paul said in the interview:

But along with that, I also put out a political type of business investment newsletter that sort of covered all these areas. And it covered a lot about what was going on in Washington, and financial events, and especially some of the monetary events. Since I had been especially interested in monetary policy, had been on the banking committee, and still very interested in, in that subject, that this newsletter dealt with it. This had to do with the value of the dollar, the pros and cons of the gold standard, and of course the disadvantages of all the high taxes and spending that our government seems to continue to do.

Morrissey says: "For a man who now says that he didn’t pay any attention to the newsletters published under his own name for years, he certainly seems to be pretty conversant with its contents in 1995." And the time period is an interesting one, if we recall what Dave Weigel and Julian Sanchez found out about the newsletters once they started investigating the matter:

The tenor of Paul's newsletters changed over the years. The ones published between Paul's return to private life after three full terms in congress (1985) and his Libertarian presidential bid (1988) notably lack inflammatory racial or anti-gay comments. The letters published between Paul's first run for president and his return to Congress in 1996 are another story—replete with claims that Martin Luther King "seduced underage girls and boys," that black protesters should gather "at a food stamp bureau or a crack house" rather than the Statue of Liberty, and that AIDS sufferers "enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."

Eric Dondero, Paul's estranged former volunteer and personal aide, worked for Paul on and off between 1987 and 2004 (back when he was named "Eric Rittberg"), and since the Iraq war has become one of the congressman's most vociferous and notorious critics. By Dondero's account, Paul's inner circle learned between his congressional stints that "the wilder they got, the more bombastic they got with it, the more the checks came in. You think the newsletters were bad? The fundraising letters were just insane from that period."

So, at the time of the interview, the content of the newsletters was of the more infamous variety, rather than the tamer stuff of the mid to late 1980s. At the same time, the content that Paul seems most "conversant" about in the interview is the tamer stuff in which he's consistently and conspicuously taken an interest -- monetary policy, central banking, and the gold standard.

Not that you'd go on C-SPAN and say, "Hey, check out these racist newsletters I've been putting out," mind you!

Whether or not Paul means to tout these newsletters, and get more subscribers, is debatable. That he was aware of their existence at the time of their most vicious content is not. And yet the same air of mystery -- which is perhaps constructed, by design! -- over what Paul knew and when he knew it remains unpenetrated. If you are inclined to defend Ron Paul, you can say that he still seems to lack awareness of the newsletters' content. If you are inclined to disparage Paul, you point out that here he is, essentially copping to running a lucrative post-political career newsletter operation that traded in divisive venom.

The larger question that remains was best put into words by Steve Kornacki this morning:

Shouldn't Paul at least pretend to be interested in finding out who used his newsletter to send out awful, racist screeds?

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) December 22, 2011

That's the galling thing -- if Paul is the victim here, why isn't fingering the culpable party something that consumes him? I think we can reasonably speculate that most people, if faced with a similar controversy, would move heaven and earth to clear their good names. Paul has, in the recent past, said that he takes "moral responsibility" for these writings, but this seems to be the bare minimum of effort that one puts forth when one just wants to close the chapter. It's old news...I want to put it behind me...it's time to move on...these are the sorts of things that professional athletes say at the press conference they stage after they've been caught knocking their wives around.

Whether or not Paul is ultimately responsible for these writings, it remains a yawning vacuum into which responsibility must be poured. At the moment, Ron Paul is the only person who can fulfill this responsibility, and simply repudiating the contents of the newsletters and asking everyone to move on is clearly not cutting it.

A suggestion, then: let's allow that these newsletters are a product of journalism -- bad, irresponsible journalism -- that their publisher must now responsibly retract. To my mind, the best way to go about this is a three-step process. First, you explain, in chapter and verse detail, what the controversy involves -- you literally narrate what happened. Second, you explain, as best as you are able, how it came to pass that this bilge ended up in newsletters bearing your name. Third, you detail as fully as you can your step-by-step strategy for ensuring that it never happens again.

And perhaps the fourth part of the process is that you accept that even after a full explanation, you maybe don't restore your tarnished credibility. Nevertheless, Paul has treated this matter as an object that appears in his rearview mirror, rather than stopping to face it head-on. He ought to give it a try.

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