Romney: New Hampshire or Bust

Mitt Romney has been left scrambling to find a way to restore momentum to his presidential campaign in the wake of a costly, humiliating defeat in Iowa, Time reports. Mike Huckabee's legions of evangelical Christians disrupted what Ana Marie Cox calls his "carefully calibrated strategy to conduct the political version of a leveraged buyout." And a surging John McCain will be a bigger threat than the man one of Mitt's supporters called incredulously "a country sleaze."

With Romney's massive spend in Iowa constituting a "kindling strategy"—designed to light a fire in the primaries to follow—the Washington Post's Michael Shear deems the battle ahead close to doomed: "The truth is that they are going to have to light a fire in New Hampshire with some very soggy wood." (More Iowa caucuses stories.)