Hey,

So, I’m in Castro’s Back Room in Concord, New Hampshire. I haven’t been here in years, but it looks exactly as I remembered. 

Another thing I haven’t done here in a while is rank punditry (I mean here, in this “news”letter). This is in part because I do it in my column and on TV and on podcasts—gotta pay the bills—and in part because we have people who are better at it than me at The Dispatch. 

But this is the week between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary so if not now, when? And since I’ve got to get to a Dispatch event in a few hours, I’m just going to let the punditry flow until I have to stop. 

Let’s start with the obvious. Trump won Iowa, bigly. There’s no getting around that. I don’t think anyone is shocked when I say I’m disappointed. Not surprised, just disappointed. I mean, most disappointments in life aren’t surprises. When I lose the lottery, look at the results on a bathroom scale, discover that the forecast for crappy weather was accurate, or wake up to a hangover, it’s often disappointing, but rarely surprising.