ROMNEY TAKES MICHIGAN.  WAKE ME UP.

Mitt Romney won the Republican primary in Michigan yesterday.  Notice how the world has changed.  Look, he was born there.  His father was a three-term governor.  He was burning bushels of cash.  If he couldn't win under those conditions, he would have been a candidate for a Stalin purge.  It doesn't, though, mean a thing.  Incredibly, the South Carolina primary is this Saturday.  By Friday night, Michigan will be as yesterday as New Hampshire.  A Rasmussen poll taken Sunday shows McCain up by nine in South Carolina, but who really knows?  The way things are going, each leading GOP candidate may get a chance to win one primary, if only to brag to the kids.  The GOP has become a model of the very thing the left worships - a kind of surface harmony, where everyone is equal and nobody is made to feel too bad.

Florida votes on the 29th.  That's a week from Tuesday.  Even that will be forgotten with all deliberate speed, since Super Tuesday, when 20 states vote, bursts out only a week later.  Then we may know something.  The greatest danger to the Republicans, it seems to me, is not that their race is tight, with the possibility of there being no clear choice for months.  That could be exciting, with the party remaining in the spotlight.  No, the greatest danger to the GOP is CDS - Clinton Derangement Syndrome - the rightist equivalent of Bush Derangement Syndrome, for which no cure has been found.  (But wait for the heartbreaking telethon.)  Republicans appear so overjoyed at Hillary's distress that they're forgetting that they may face Barack Obama.  He is formidable, and a specialist at seeking office, if at nothing else.  I see no Republican game plan being developed to battle him, and one should be ready.  We started developing a plan to fight the Japanese at the start of the 20th century.  It came in handy.  Republicans, right now, should be planning to battle either Clinton or Obama, and not take too much pleasure in the former first lady's troubles.  It may be the Democrats, not the Republicans, who put her away.

Posted on January 16, 2008.