DES MOINES–Did Hillary Clinton make a mistake by not skipping Iowa’s caucuses? She was advised last May to pass them up by campaign aide Mike Henry. He wrote in a memo that Clinton should quit wasting time and money on Iowa and go “where the delegates are.”

Henry argued that the New York Democrat would have to spend more than $15 million to contest the caucuses, devote a minimum of 75 days campaigning in Iowa and all for a likely inconclusive outcome. He predicted that the top three finishers would be within a point or two of each other, thus the caucuses “will provide little or no bounce for anyone.”

At the time Henry wrote, most polls of likely Democratic caucus-goers had Clinton running behind John Edwards. She has led in most Iowa polling since then but the race is believed to have tightened. As of now, a couple of months prior to the Jan. 3 caucus date, Henry’s prediction of a no-bounce result looks to be prescient.

Henry needed no crystal ball to realize that Iowa is delegate-deficient. It will have just 56 votes out of the more than 4,000 to be cast at the Democratic national convention in Denver.

Of those 56, the caucuses will be the opening round in selecting only 29. That’s right, all of that polling, spending, debating, telephoning, speculating and pontificating is about the choice of just 29 drops in the Democratic national convention bucket. And that choice will be made by a small fraction of registered Iowa Democrats, perhaps as few as the one in five who attend caucuses.

In rejecting Henry’s advice and going all-out for a showing in the caucuses Clinton surely realized that the stakes are much greater than 29 delegates. That’s because the press inflates the significance of the Iowa event beyond recognition. It does that by commission and omission. The commission: excessive coverage that oversells Iowa’s importance. The omission – the failure to place the caucuses in perspective by reporting how truly miniscule is Iowa’s role in the nominating process – makes the overselling all the more glaring.

It’s a safe bet that few if any news organizations will report high up in their caucus coverage that Iowa Democrats on Jan. 3 took the first step in choosing all of 29 national convention delegates. In 2004, a major national news organization reported the Iowa caucus story without mentioning that it had anything at all to do with choosing delegates.

In a sense, it’s not about delegates, but about how the press perceives the horse race. Never mind that the perception is based on a tiny bit of evidence extremely early in the competition, so early that it’s comparable to calling a race based on how contestants break from the starting gate.

Given the fuss that’s made over the caucuses Clinton would have been branded an opportunistic quitter had she followed Henry’s advice and pulled out of the Iowa contest. If she had been a dropout, and been honest about the reason – namely, that Iowa’s caucuses are much ado about very little – she would have been pilloried here in perpetuity.

So, on balance, Clinton probably made the right call in continuing to contest the caucuses. But Mike Henry made a powerful case, and if Clinton stumbles in the delegate-rich states later because she over-invested in Iowa it wouldn’t be because she wasn’t warned.