There's been a lot of talk in the last couple days (and generally over the last few months) about the badness of the Iowa caucus system, but how's this for odd irrelevance? Checking out CNN for full results I find that the caucuses are responsible for choosing 45 Democratic and 37 Republican convention delegates. That's out of totals of 4,049 and 2,380, respectively. Barack Obama, for winning, gets 14 delegates, compared to 13 for Clinton and 12 for Edwards (CNN has Edwards in second, but Iowa has some kind of undemocratic delegate allocation scheme). So, to recap: about six months of light campaigning, about three months of heavy campaigning, about three months of really heavy campaigning, tens of millions of dollars, dozens of columns from east coast pundits about how "real" Iowans are, a couple handfuls of petty scandals, and a one-delegate lead for Obama that will be spun as several orders of magnitude more important.

(While I was writing this post, CNN took down their projected delegate allocations, but I dare say the point still stands even if Obama heads to New Hampshire with, for example, a four-delegate lead.)