So Romney has won, and it appears as if his margin of victory is larger than expected (currently nine points with 23% reporting).  I need a drink.

“I take my inspiration from Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.” ~Romney, during his acceptance speech

Notice how he is always inserting Bush the Elder’s middle names these days to make sure that no one will ever mistake this for an endorsement of the sitting President.  I can’t blame him for not wanting to mention Mr. Bush by name, but it’s pretty remarkable for someone who demands apologies from other candidates when they make accurate assessments of administration flaws.

To that you might say, “Well, of course he still loses.  He’s polling around 3% up there!”  But that’s not entirely what I mean.  Obviously, yet another miserable election result, in this case one in which Giuliani may be bringing up the very back of the pack, will confirm the narrative that “Giuliani is finished” and scare off the donors he needs to keep going, but it is worse than that.  After tonight, Giuliani is no longer simply weakening, but he becomes basically irrelevant.  His numbers in Florida (and now California) began dropping after New Hampshire, and after tonight they will all start to migrate to McCain.  His campaign will likely stumble on for a few more weeks and then bid us farewell.  (It is likely that he will endorse McCain, if he endorses anyone, since those two have rarely come to blows during the campaign.) 

With McCain’s momentary success, we are seeing Giuliani being replaced completely as the ostensible national security/”leadership” candidate (with the added bonus that the replacement actually knows something about national security!).  Most people now seem to see Giuliani’s candidacy for the irrelevancy and absurdity that it was.  In all of American history, former mayors have never gone directly to being presidential nominees (even Grover Cleveland stopped over in Albany for a couple years before his election), and it was the ultimate arrogant display by an extremely arrogant man to make the attempt in the first place.  Meanwhile, if Romney manages to win, he becomes the default anti-McCain, leaving no room for Giuliani anywhere.  Even if Romney loses, he still has money to continue competing if he wants, while Giuliani cannot draw upon such a large personal reserve.  

Now Romney is disliked by enough people already, and he keeps alienating enough people once they do learn about him, that McCain assumes his Dole/Kerry role of the inevitable frontrunner who may yet prove, in the end, to be inevitable.  Huckabee will put up a decent fight through the Southern primaries, but he seems to have been successfully pigeonholed as the evangelical populist (despite his pretty thin populist credentials) and he has decided to embrace that role completely.  On paper, Huckabee ought to be the right GOP nominee for this cycle, but it doesn’t seem to be happening as I thought it could.      

Despite my absolutely atrocious record at predictions in the last couple of weeks, I shall offer up another batch, if only for your amusement.  In this presidential campaign, making predictions for any reason seems to be a guaranteed path to failure and ridicule, but that’s never stopped me before.  So, here it is: McCain wins tonight despite any poor weather that might be depressing turnout, but he wins only very narrowly.  Romney finishes respectably close, but still finishes second, and his campaign starts to unravel, despite the best efforts of Hugh Hewitt to portray another embarrassing repudiation as a moral victory.  Nevada and South Carolina then probably confirm the strange new world where McCain is winning more races than he is losing, and Florida then likewise goes to McCain.  Huckabee wins in a few Southern states besides Arkansas, but then bows out before too much longer.  The McCain-Huckabee ticket, which I foolishly regarded as improbable some weeks ago, now seems only too possible.  In the end, if he were to be the nominee, McCain would probably not poke his finger in the establishment’s eye yet again with his veep selection by choosing someone so deeply disliked by much of that establishment.  Then again, it might be just the kind of assertion of authority over the party that McCain would love to make.  

All of that is subject to change in a few hours, when the terrible curse of a positive Larison prediction causes McCain to lose badly.

Ross says:

Meanwhile, even 24, ostensibly the most right-wing hour on television, features what Martha Bayles, writing in this season’s Claremont Review of Books, terms a “timid selection of villains,” including “vengeful Serbs, a bitchy German, red-handed Mexican drug lords, a turncoat British spy, a greedy oil executive, power-mad government officials (including one president), and—once in a blue moon, when the Council on American-Islamic Relations is looking the other way—violent jihadists.”

Once in a blue moon?  Really?  They happen to be among the main players in no less than three of the six seasons.  Even if you take the view that they were phoning it in during the sixth season and simply recycling old plotlines from earlier seasons (e.g., Arabs with nukes, the Vice President trying to force the President out via the 25th Amendment, terrorist youths in our suburbs!, etc.), 24 has assembled a small army of Middle Eastern actors and extras over the years.  Perhaps the only thing more annoying than general hysteria  about “Islamofascists” is the rather bizarre obsession with pretending that American pop culture has not endorsed this hysteria with gusto.

Even those who mentioned immigration — or “the illegal aliens,” as Wolfis put it — seemed unaware that McCain was an outspoken Republican advocate for providing illegal immigrants with a pathway to citizenship last spring. ~The Politico

Can’t man the do anything that isn’t fake?

Suppose that the Kossacks succeed in pushing a large number of Democrats to vote for Romney in the primary tomorrow.  Wouldn’t this taint any Romney victory and allow his opponents to turn his criticism of McCain’s New Hampshire victory back on him (i.e., that he won because of non-Republican votes)?  Wouldn’t it reinforce every criticism of Romney as insufficiently or unreliably conservative?  Given the necessarily Michigan-centric, dare I say populist, campaign he is running at the moment, won’t any victory in Michigan be a pyrrhic one, in which he discredits the claim that he is a “full-spectrum conservative”?  Doesn’t his policy record already discredit him?

Do these people actually want me to start rooting for Huckabee against all better judgement?  Because that’s what this ad makes me want to do.

Via Steve Clemons

Feel the enthusiasm!

Is nothing sacred to Romneyites?

As I was looking at Casting Stones, I came across this post that had some interesting information on an important Michigan endorsement for Romney.  Apparently, Marlene Elwell, an old Christian Coalition hand and one-time Pat Robertson backer, has been working hard to stop Huckabee, and here is one of her reasons:

Though she says the Huckabee camp repeatedly tried to sign her during 2007, Elwell calls the former Arkansas governor a liberal on non-hot button social issues like education.

What this means in the real world is that one of the few candidates actively supported by a large network of homeschooling families and one of the strongest defenders of homeschooling in the race is “liberal” on education because he doesn’t support school vouchers.  This takes crazy litmus-test politics to a new level, or a new low, depending on how you want to look at it.  The principled reason to support vouchers is that you support the right of parents to choose where their children can go to school, so it is preposterous to say that a leading defender of homeschooling is simply a “liberal” on education without any qualification.  If you don’t like his position on vouchers, fine, but let’s be honest about what the real objection is.  Vouchers are a debatable policy, and they are unusually unpopular with the actual suburban middle-class voters whose schools would be affected by these policies (or who fear that these policies might affect their schools).  How vouchers went from being a slightly oddball, Jack Kemp-esque initiative proposal in the ’90s to the end-all, be-all of education reform on the right is one of those mysteries that someone else will have to solve.