It's pretty clear after Stupor Tuesday's voting that the GOPer base does not want Richie Richney as their presidential candidate. For Richney to transform once again into the superhero Mr. Inevitable, he needed to spin around three times while chanting the magic words: I won Tennessee! I won Ohio! But instead he lost Tennessee, by a lot, to Little Ricky Sanctimonious, who also beat him in Oklahoma and North Dakota. They essentially tied in Ohio, though Richney gets the victory by a few thousand votes with a surge late in the evening. But that it took all night testifies to his weakness.
Why was the CPW so wrong about Stupor Tuesday? Partly because the most conservative voters--the ones who consider anything other than Fox and Rush to be the lamestream media--like to lie to pollsters, or avoid them altogether. Partly because vote totals combine early and absentee ballots and voting day ballots, in an apparently volatile year when choices change from week to week, and now from hour to hour (polling showed Richney gaining over the weekend, but Tuesday "deciders" breaking for Ricky) so polls and CPW predictions are pretty useless. But one conclusion that the CPW may make in the next few days is that the hostility towards Romney by the Christian Right GOPer base remains very strong, and apparently impervious to Establishment endorsements and endlessly repeated negative ads.
Richney won more delegates than anyone Tuesday, so he is still the frontrunner. But even with all this week's high profile endorsements, and even with outspending everybody else by at something like 10 to 1, he could not put Sanctimonious away, and Casino Newt won Georgia pretty easily too.
So here's where things stand in the GOPer nominating circus: nobody can win enough delegates by primary and caucus elections to have a winning majority before the convention. The Richney people conceded today that he couldn't. And there does not appear to be a way that any of the other candidates can either. This is going to the GOPer convention without a numerical winner. (Richney won the Virginia primary, where his only opponent was Ron Paul, because the other candidates fumbled the eligibility requirements. Less than 6% of GOPers voted in that primary.)
Richney cannot get the votes of the non-rich and Evangelicals. Combine the votes of Little Ricky and Casino Newt, and Richney is toast in most of these states. But while Ricky's folks are going to try to convince Gingles folks that he should drop out in favor of Ricky, it's unlikely to happen. Casino Newt can see that Ricky can't possibly get to the convention with enough delegates, even if they combine forces. But if nobody has the nom by convention time, Gingles goes there with the power of his delegates, and at least theoretically becomes a kingmaker.
I remember walking by the freak show tent at carnivals in my youth, reading the enticements, but I never went in (Nice Catholic Boy that I was.) Whatever pleasure to be had there would be perverse one way or another, maybe perversely scary and more likely perversely hilarious, but hard to see how I'd emerge from it feeling anything but dirty. That's what this circus feels like. It is so crazy, and yet we are talking about the presidency of the U.S. at a critical time in human history. HUMAN history, and the history of life on this planet--which nobody is talking about! It's perverse to the max. None of these clowns is fit to be President of the United States. Fortunately, we've got a real President. If we can keep him.
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