After a drumbeat for the better part of a year, the Iowa caucuses are now (thankfully) history. The first votes of the 2012 election season have been taken, and Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum can all claim a qualified victory. Qualified because the caucuses allow day-of registration (meaning anyone can come in off the street and participate) but, more importantly, the caucus process itself chooses winners and losers based on the wheeling and dealing nature of the caucuses themselves. Remember that back in 2008 Mike Huckabee was the winner in Iowa; lotta good that did him. Next week New Hampshire will host the first true GOP primary, followed by all-important South Carolina and Florida – two states destined to play a much larger role in who will ultimately be the GOP’s nominee than anything Iowa or New Hampshire do.

Still, Iowa does has a habit of beginning the whittling down process, and there were some definite losers who will pack their bags for New Hampshire and South Carolina knowing they’ve got the odds stacked heavily against them:

Michele Bachmann’s campaign is Titanic + iceberg + 50 minutes post-collision. I think she’s wrangling for a VP consideration if Mitt Romney gets the eventual nomination, but she has to know her campaign is done. Proving once again that, unless you’re someone like Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan (who has done much to shape the political debate this year) folks running from Congress lack the record, experience, and gravitas to effectively run for President. Stick a fork in her, she’s done.

Rick Perry spent something like $40 mil on ad buys in Iowa and came in low second-tier. To speak in the vernacular of a Texan, he’s got one bullet left in his gun, and that’s to turn in a larger-than-life boffo performance in this coming Saturday night’s debate in South Carolina. It’s the only chance he’s got. If he doesn’t finish first or second in SC, his campaign is over.

Newt Gingrich is also a loser in Iowa. Just a month ago his campaign was riding high in the polls after receiving the endorsement of New Hampshire’s influential Manchester Union Leader but he immediate squandered his good fortune: first, with his foolish pronouncement that he was the GOP’s inevitable nominee, then allowing Mitt Romney to get under his skin with his comment about Newt’s past association with Fannie Mae, and finally his last debate performance where he talked about impeaching judges for extra-Constitutional legal decisions. In doing so, he showed himself as pompous, thin-skinned, and esoteric – the very same qualities that got him removed as House Speaker way back in the late ’90s. Newt is too smart for his own good, always has been. Which is too bad, I liked Newt a lot.