The Iowa Gab Fest. This is the daily podcast from Slate.com for Friday, January 4th. I'm Andy Bowers.

Barack 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, 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,

...