Ross Douthat has had it with primary coverage that pretends the outcome is in doubt:

But the basic pattern will hold, and the consequences are eminently predictable: Either Romney will clear the 1,144 delegate threshold in May or early June, or else he’ll fall 50-100 delegates short and need to play a little inside baseball to win some of the uncommitted delegates. In either scenario, Santorum is not going to be the party’s standard-bearer, and neither is Jeb Bush or Chris Christie or Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee or anyone else besides the man who is actually winning, however slowly and grindingly and unexcitingly, the Republican nomination for president.

One of the things that makes the race so thoroughly predictable at this point is that the candidates’ bases of support are so consistent from one primary to another. Romney leads among less conservative and moderate/liberal voters, but falls behind with more conservative voters, and the reverse is true for Santorum. Santorum’s problem is that the former two voting blocs outnumber the latter. Romney’s organizational and funding advantages allow him to maximize the number of delegates he wins, and Santorum’s lack of both organization and funding have already eliminated him from contention in some contests or sabotaged his efforts to deprive Romney of delegates. Dreadful inevitability refers to the dreadfulness of Romney as the nominee, of course, and I suppose it could also refer to the dreadfully poor competition Romney has had to face*, but Romney’s inevitability is dreadful in other ways as well. Another aspect of it is that his path to the nomination will evidently prove to be long and torturous, but it will be no more preventable because of that.

* Would Romney have fared worse against a field filled with fantasy candidates? One might think so, but one constant in this cycle is that almost everyone has wildly overestimated the competence and competitiveness of Romney’s opponents while being oblivious to the competitors’ weaknesses. It seems hard to believe that a field of fantasy candidates wouldn’t have dispatched Romney, but that is probably because we have already forgotten how confident so many people were that the actual field of candidates would be able to defeat him.