it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
- from "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare

After all the debates and political ads and discussions and talking heads pontificating, the first shot across the bow of the political flotilla was fired last night. The Iowa caucus ushered in the beginning of the primaries for the 2012 election. Despite threats by some firebaggers dissatisfied lefties, President Barack Obama won the Democratic caucus. You wouldn't know there was a Democratic caucus, since 100% of the attention was on the Republican caucus results.

The Santorum jokes were flying fast and furious on Twitter as he kept "surging from behind" into a "three-way" with Romney and Ron Paul. Eventually, Romney came out on top as Santorum squeezed into a tight number two position.

Okay, I'll stop.

Ultimately, Romney "won" by eight votes. With all the breathless second-guessing and analysis of every district in the state, you'd think this was the Most Important Thing Ever in this 2012 race. Is it? Iowa is notoriously bad at predicting the eventual winner of the party nomination, and equally bad at predicting the final winner in November.

It's not even significant in the overall delegate count required to win. The winner will need 1145 delegates (out of 2286) and Iowa provides 28.

I think the bigger story here is the percentages. Romney essentially won with 25% of the vote (30,015 votes). Only one fourth of the people casting ballots wanted him to win. Is that something to get excited about? There's also the total number of voters to consider: Approximately 123K votes were cast, and there are 640K registered Republicans in the state:

So doing the math, less than 20% of registered Republicans were inspired to even show up and cast a vote, in an election year where the Republican mantra is "we must replace Obama". Considering that Romney won with 25% of the 20% of registered Republican voters in the state, that means that less than 5% of Registered Republicans in the state voted for Romney.

I have to ask: is that a win worth celebrating? It's like celebrating victory in a race by being first off the starting line before any of the racers even enter the first turn.

The spin is that this is all about momentum going into the other primaries. Santorum is back on top, Newt is back down, Perry is considering dropping out, Bachmann is still limping along, and Ron Paul doubled his usual 10% of supporters to nearly 20% (of the 20% that showed up). Huntsman was barely a blip.

There are 3 more primaries this month, so we'll see how this progresses, but it will be interesting to measure the Republican primary voter enthusiasm by the percentage of registered voters (in closed primary states) that actually show up. If Iowa is any indication, the collective yawn of the voters is the real story here.