Single Digits

So let me get this straight . . ..  Out of sixty thousand votes cast between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum at the Iowa caucuses yesterday, Romney won by eight.  I'm sure Romney would have preferred to win by more than eight thousand votes.  But when I say eight, I don't mean eight thousand.  I mean . . . eight.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . eight.

Romney won 30,015 votes in Iowa last night.  He would have had to win 36,000 votes to get at least 30 percent and pull out of the 25 percent bracket he'd been in through various opinion polls for months.  As it was, he couldn't win 36,000 votes.  In fact, compared to his 2008 total in Iowa, Romney was off by six.  

Not six thousand.  Six.  One, two, three, four, five . . . six.

That's right, Romney won six fewer votes in Iowa in 2012 than the 30,021 votes he won in 2008.

So, not only did 75 percent of all Iowa Republicans vote against Romney, those that did vote for him gave him a Pyrrhic victory with a margin in single digits over Santorum.  And after all the time and money he spent in Iowa, his vote total was smaller than when he lost the Iowa contest to Mike Huckabee in 2008 - by single digits.  

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann - a woman whose intelligence quotient is likely measured in single digits - dropped out of the race.  The number of people who will miss her can be counted with a single digit - 0.