The Iowa Gab Fest. This is the daily podcast from Slate.com for Friday, January 4th. I'm Andy Bowers. Barak and Mike are up, Hillary and Mitt are down, and the Gab Fest team is here to help you make sense of it all. In fact, over at SlateV.com, you can even see

video excerpts of this discussion. Leading it is David from Washington.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab vest. I am David Plotz, lonely, alone,

here in Washington, D.C., the morning after the Iowa caucuses, and remotely somewhere are Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson.

Where are you guys?

We're in Manchester.

Manchester, I'm sure that is.

Yeah, in a hotel room.

Don't tell anyone.

Why are you not in Iowa?

No, we were in Iowa.

Emily, tell David what just happened to us.

Well, I'm having my moment pretending to be a political correspondent.

So I was in Iowa with John yesterday, although we were in separate places.

I was covering a caucus in the farming town of El Dora, and John was in Des Moines,

and then we flew here very late last night and got here, oh, about 4.30 in the morning.

That's right.

We flew on Hillary Clinton's plane, which lacked Hillary Clinton.

But that still, was it incredibly grim being on Hillary Clinton's plane?

Well, not really, because it was almost entirely press.

And there were some senior officials from her campaign who were just spinning madly,

which it was probably creating some sort of FAA problem. But it wasn't too terribly grim. There were down drafts. There were down draft that could have taken the plane down. Right, exactly. What were they trying to spin? What were they trying to say? Well, essentially they... How could they put a good face on last night? No, not really. I mean, basically they were saying they'd met their targets and they'd turned out all these people, all these women,

...