It took till 1:30 in the morning, but the Iowa Republican Party finally gave us a winner in the long-awaited Iowa caucuses. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won by 8 votes out of 122,255 cast. But it was still a moral victory for the morality candidate, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who was a lonely figure in a pick-up truck traversing the state's 99 counties just a few weeks back. This makes Franken v. Coleman seem like a landslide. The margin in Iowa was something like .000065 percent, give or take a zero. But as the night wore on in Des Moines, and the story of Santorum's improbable surge became more real, some wags couldn't help commenting that he may just be the latest flavor of the month in a race that's seen at least five front-runners. And he peaked at the right time, before the political world really took enough notice to vet him. Not so with Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann, who got the front-runner treatment back in August, when she won the straw poll in Ames. This morning, she finished last.