OK, according to Drudge and other savants it’s a LANDSLIDE for Romney in the Florida Primary. That can happen when you outspend your chief opponent 5-1, as the well-coiffed Mitt Romney did. I think Marco Rubio may well be right: the chap who wins Florida will be the chap who garners the Republican nomination. That chap, we now know, is named Mitt Romney. Yes, yes: a week is a long time in politics, as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once observed. The sky could fall. Mitt Romney could be caught in bed with Michelle Obama. He could be caught in bed with Barack Obama. Possibility is cheap. What’s likely is that Mitt will be the nominee — despite this poll, which has Newt beating out everyone for the nomination. It is also, I submit, likely that (if the polls and the markets are to be believed) Mitt will lose against Obama. (Newt, by the way, loses by an even bigger margin.) What can I say? I have nothing against Mitt Romney. If if does garner the nomination, I’ll yawn and pull the lever for him when the time comes. But, as I’ve often said, he’s our Bob Dole: the safe guy, the guy who is next next in line, the guy that the establishment can line up behind because he won’t “rock the boat,” because he won’t challenge the status quo in any fundamental way, because he has the same tapioca running through his veins that Barack Obama has, only he is not a narcissistic anti-America radical whose incompetence vies with his malevolence for ascendency. Mitt is a nice guy who knows how to manage things, even if he has been a dismal failure in getting himself elected. He is, as I’ve also said, a company man at a moment when the problem is the company. But the Republican establishment wants Mitt. He is, they say, more “electable” than anyone else actually running. I suppose that will be some consolation when his candidacy puts Barack Obama back in the White House.
I hope I am wrong about all this. Let’s see.
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