All done in Iowa

My going to bed early last night meant that I didn’t see the final Iowa results until this morning. But before turning in, I followed the results via Google, rather than listening to the blabbering of the talking heads on TV. I did watch some caucus action on CSPAN, though, which I found quite entertaining.

It was a hoot to watch the folks count the caucus votes, all handwritten on slips of green paper. The votes were tallied on a legal pad, by hand. They punched the numbers into a calculator, as they calculated the percentages that each candidate received. At one point, there was a minor disagreement over what the calculator results meant: is that 3% or point 3%? Reminded me of my students

Then I watched them call in the results to the headquarters. The woman on the other end obviously had the candidates listed in alphabetically order, which seemed to trip up the caller a bit. When the woman asked for the vote totals for Herman Cain, he looked truly confused, as no one in his caucus had voted for Cain.

All in all, I’m glad the hype over Iowa is done. Now to move on to the next hype: New Hampshire