Exclusive AccuWeather Iowa Straw Poll Post-Analytics

Expending precious minutes on a park bench with my pocket calculator crunching the numbers of yesterday's Iowa straw poll--breaking the data down according to age, sex, ethnicity, marital status, number of bats in belfry, on-base percentage, and favorite balloon color--I've divined the true message of yesterday's sham of a mockery of a charade:

The Smilies--Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee--won.

The Grumpies--Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo--lost.

Yes, Mitt Romney's smile is as phony as everything else about this self-constructed android, his "sunny disposition" simply another subroutine downloaded in the lab, but it's there, it's operational, it signifies Reaganesque Optimism with only minor hints of facial strain.

In contrast, Mike Huckabee's smiling demeanor seems ingrained, an organic expression of amiable nature, as if there's an actual person up there in plain view on the political stage capable of blips of spontaneity. In every fat man, the saying goes, there's a thin man trying to get out, and his thin man was actually able to reach daylight and enjoy the open air, which may explain his relative buoyancy compared to the undertakers in the race.

The poor showings for Duncan Hunter (his face like an angry fist) and Tom Tancredo (who strings barbed wire with every nativist, warhawk soundbite--"There's only one rule of engagement - I believe we should go into war with: 'We win; they lose,' ") indicate that even heartland Republicans have had their fill of macho-man glower. Both these guys look like their spoiling for a fight, and they haven't reckoned with the fatigue of the electorate, which isn't up for another endless bout.

Falling somewhere between these camps is Sam Brownback, who mimes a reasonable, imperturbable, soothing, preacherly facade with his body language but mouths a more militant, authoritarian spiel that propounds a hobgoblin Fox News point of view--"We should be able to say 'one nation under God in our flag salute without someone threatening to sue us," Brownback intoned before the straw poll in Ames, Iowa, which is the sort of "Mommy, I saw a secular humanist choking Santa Claus in the manger" crap that Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson peddle at the first hint of autumn chill. His piety suggests a praying mantis ready to feast.

Where does this leave the Big Three who didn't compete in Iowa, Giuliani, McCain, and Fred Thompson?

Me dunno. Giuliani's grinning like a mad jack in the box even as he dispenses two-fisted tough talk, which seems dissonant to me but then I'm not a Republican, I can't drop myself that many arcade levels of perception. McCain is ready to check in any day now into the Memory Motel while Thompson soaks in a bathtub of warm gravy sopping up enough authenticity for a man-sized biscuit with only two things on his mind: lovin' his woman and becomin' president, even if the latter entails a little thing known in the dictionary as "effort."

Keeping the spirit of vaudeville alive only to kill it all over again, mirth maker Mark Steyn adds his unique perspective on the post straw-poll political landscape, the strain of the Conrad Black verdict obviously telling.