BY RICHARD A. LEE

COMMENTARY

Now that the Iowa caucuses are over, what do we know about the 2012 presidential contest that we didn't know before voters in the Hawkeye State took part in the first major electoral event of the campaign?

The truth is we don’t know a whole lot more than we did before the caucuses. At best, the Iowa contest confirmed what we already suspected about Mitt Romney: Despite his frontrunner status, the former Massachusetts governor has yet to energize the Republican Party. He won Iowa by a mere eight votes and received just 24.6 percent of the total votes cast. These are not the types of numbers that build momentum.

Slight as the victory was, Romney can take some solace in the fact that he emerged as the winner after having trailed Newt Gingrich in most of the polls leading up to the caucuses. But Gingrich’s poor showing on Tuesday probably had more to do with the attack ads launched against him than with increased enthusiasm for Romney’s candidacy.