Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

The Big Super Tuesday Story

The big story coming out of Super Tuesday for the GOP side will be McCain’s convincing wins in the big winner take all states. He now has a clear pathway to the nomination. I’m never going to love John McCain, so pardon me if I fail to show enthusiasm for the prospect.

Of course, it’s likely that the media will spin the Huckabee comeback as an even bigger story. As Andrew Sullivan‘s already telling it, “The Biggest News” is “Huckabee’s astonishing resilience, with so few dollars and so little organization.” As I observed in the preceding post, in which I live blogged the election the entire day, this is very bad news for Mitt Romney. I say this for three reasons. First, he needed some free media momentum. He needed the press to be calling him the comeback kid, so as to put some roadblocks in McCain’s path. That won’t happen. Second, Romney needed to eliminate Huckabee once and for all to make the remaining states two man races. That won’t happen. Third, Romney’s third place finish in so many Southern and border states exposes him as a potentially very weak general election candidate. In many states the GOP must hold simply to prevent a Democratic landslide, Romney had very little traction.

In sum, Huckabee can’t win. And now, Romney won’t. Which is a very good thing.