Michele Bachmann | The Boston Gazette

You can’t turn on the TV right now without hearing about the roller coaster that is the Iowa Caucus. Their is nearly constant blathering about the polls, and who is rising and falling and who will end up on top.

“Winning” the caucus is defined as getting the highest percentage of votes. This totally misses the point of the real role of the Iowa Caucus.

The point of the caucus is to winnow the field. Traditionally there are three tickets out of Iowa. This year they will belong to Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Perry.

Rick Santorum may very well win the caucus or come very close, but it will be a hollow victory. He has no organization in any other state and no money to set one up. He will be lucky to have enough plane fare to get to New Hampshire and he certainly will not be able to get ads up in South Carolina or Florida. He is done.

I have been a fan of Newt, but Iowa has been a buzz-saw for his campaign. He is off message due to Romney’s negative ads, and has no no money to get ads up in response and no ability to raise more. His campaign is effectively over.

Michele Bachmann is also done. She may get fewer votes in the caucus than she did in the straw poll. What organization she has is disintegrating around her. She staked everything on Iowa. She needs to return to the House and lead the Tea Party Caucus and start solidifying support for a Bachmann Speakership in the next Congress.

That leaves Rick Perry as the conservative alternative to Romney. He will make it out of Iowa in the top four, with the necessary resources to continue his campaign to New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond.

Perry has a better organization in South Carolina than he does in Iowa, and he should be easily able to defeat Romney there thanks to Perry’s brand of social conservatism and tea party values.

Ron Paul will also be a help to Perry as it will focus conservatives on the need to rally behind a candidate in order to stop not only Romney, but Paul as well.

Iowa has done it’s job, it has picked the conservative candidate and I believe the next President of the United States: Rick Perry.

Game on.

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With the latest betrayal by John Boehner of the grassroots tea party conservatives that put him in the Speaker’s chair, it is time for him to go.

The GOP had no GOTV push in 2010. All that money had been blown by Michael Steele. The reason that the GOP has a majority in the house and John Boehner is Speaker of the House is because the tea party did the job that the GOP was unable to do. We got conservatives elected to Congress.

When it came time to choose a speaker Michele Bachmann threw her name in the ring, to no avail. Imagine a House under a Speaker Bachmann. Do you think the summer debt deal debacle would have happened? Would this payroll tax “compromise” have occurred? At the very least we would have a Speaker that could articulate the conservative point of view and would not shrink from a fight. She is twice the man Boehner is.

Michele Bachmann is going nowhere as a Presidential candidate. The office she should run for is Speaker of the House. She should suspend her Presidential candidacy, return to D.C. and mount a campaign for Speaker.

She should do it today.