Santorum TKO’s Romney in GOP Iowa Caucus

“Yeah, so Rick Santorum is winning this thing,” my buddy said last night. “So why doesn’t he just go ahead and run for governor of Iowa?” If this were boxing, Santorum would have earned a technical knockout over Romney by 1 am EST.

The sound Santorum is hearing right now is not the buzz of victory. It’s the whirring of Romney Super PAC, preparing to carpet bomb him.

davidaxelrod on twitter last night

I fell asleep in my chair pushing the button to the CNN website last night that showed the map of the Iowa results.  Dubuque, Harrison, Story and Clayton counties were the only outliers, according to the website. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but did it really take until well after midnight to count the handful of votes left in each of these counties? Or was the GOP afraid that they were going to get to see the infamous video of Rick Santorum exclaiming to Iowans he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money” plastered all over the news for the next two weeks.

Mitt Romney and his people will be trying mightily to convince the political pundit class between now and next week how much this means for his momentum, but anybody who got past the third grade knows that if all you can muster is an 8 vote victory after spending years and millions campaigning, it means the momentum is behind the other guy, the one with no money or organization that you barely beat.  

Amazing how Iowa ends up picking the two top people who have not had a real job in years in the public or private sector, but they are the Einsteins who have the answers.

Anonymous blog comment at Redstate.com this morning

If I were Rick Perry, I wouldn’t drop out of the race just yet. Romney’s nebulous win in Iowa, a state not known for predicting presidential nominees, combined with today’s endorsement by the losing presidential candidate from 2008, John McCain, means it might be still wide open to anybody with some cash left in their campaign’s ballgame, which is pretty much just you, Mr. Perry, and Newt Gingrich. Gingrich, with his thin skin and tender ego, seems determined to make Mitt Romney’s team pull out the really juicy details about Gingrich’s career they have stockpiled for just such an occasion. 

What does any of this mean for the president’s re-election chances? If I were President Obama, I would pull out my Blackberry and send my campaign manager a message – “looks like Iowa is still in play.”