Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum achieved respectable totals at the Ames straw poll, with the former Minnesota governor piling up 2,293 votes and the former Pennsylvania senator amassing 1,657 ballots. But Rep. Michele Bachmann more than lapped them with 4,823.

(Ron Paul’s votes simply do not matter in the national conversation because he is incapable of winning the Republican nomination, in essence competing against himself in his own race with its own rules. Why the Republicans allow him to use their time and space to proclaim a decidedly non-Republican radical libertarianism is astonishing. Paul is closer to Ralph Nader than he is to Ronald Reagan.)