Obama and Huckabee with Hefty Margins

The numbers are in, and they're more lopsided than I expected.

Senator Barack Obama : 37.58%
Senator John Edwards : 29.75%
Senator Hillary Clinton : 29.47%
Governor Bill Richardson : 2.11%
Senator Joe Biden : 0.93%
Uncommitted : 0.14%
Senator Chris Dodd : 0.02%

I'd say Hillary's lost her air of inevitability, but she's still close enough to make it a horse race. Edwards at second should give him a shot in the arm. But Obama's decisive victory, almost 8 percentage points and 25% beyond Edwards's numbers, makes him the guy to pay attention to. Will the attack ads start airing in New Hampshire? Looking at those numbers, it can hardly be a surprise that both Dodd and Biden are pulling out. I expected Dodd to do a bit better, but it's impossible to know what his numbers were on the first go-round of caucusing.

Over on the Republican side, Huckabee did indeed pull it out, topping Romney by 9 percentage points. Could Romney have done better if he'd spent even more money? Fred Thompson, who's been fighting bad press about not being in it to win it, came in a distant third, edging out McCain, who supposedly is going to show us all in New Hampshire. Rudy Giuliani, deliberately downplaying the caucuses, may have dropped a little too low. Coming in with 4% of the vote, he has to wonder when he stops being a viable candidate.

As everybody pulls up stakes in Iowa to reset the game in New Hampshire, we've got six five days of spin to get through before the next vote.