Tampa or Bust

Slate ^ | February 8, 2012 | David Weigel

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Political reporters make for lousy gravediggers. Find a primary, pick a day, and I can point you to a story pronouncing the campaign “over” or “almost over” or over, pending the judgment of a proverbial Fat Lady.

Let’s make it easy and start last month. On Jan. 10, as Romney was winning New Hampshire, NPR quoted a Republican strategist who counted the margins and pronounced the race “over.” On Jan. 18, the Los AngelesTimes informed us that South Carolina’s primary “could essentially end” the Santorum and Gingrich campaigns. Two days later, NBC News told us that a Romney win in the first southern primary would make him “the de facto nominee.”

When Romney lost, we got pre-Florida primary headlines like “Can Mitt Romney recover from his South Carolina ‘disaster?’ ” Days later, Howard Kurtz was tap-tapping about the “distinct possibility” that the media would “bury Newt Gingrich for the third time” in Florida. No one was talking about Rick Santorum until yesterday, when the Wall Street Journal saluted Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri for “puncturing Mitt Romney's claim to be the unstoppable front-runner.”

My old colleague Jack Shafer once praised “horse race” coverage of presidential politics. “Every political reporter I know,” he wrote, “yearns to cover a deadlocked presidential convention.” It’s true. So why has every single primary spawned dull, topsy-turvy—and ultimately wrong—stories about how it “Marked the End” of one candidate or another? Tuesday’s caucus-goers have done us a real solid, forcing the media to confront the truth: The Republican race will last until April at the very least. And it’s in everybody’s interest—Candidates! Voters! Reporters! Whatever David Gergen is!—that it drags on that long or longer.

[SamAdams76]

I suppose Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann are kicking themselves in the butt for dropping out so early.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

I don’t know. They fought and the media was brutal. There is little gained at this juncture to rewind the recent past and try to suppose how it would have played out differently. Now the field is smaller and Romney’s repeated onslaught against his fellow candidates is taking a toll on him.

[SamAdams76]

Well I hope the Santorum surge is for real. It's being played down in the media because the caucuses were "meaningless beauty contests."

What is going unanswered is that if Romney has all this money and organization behind him, why couldn't he get it together to come out on top in these three "minor" contests?

Romney may have the establishment money and resources, but he couldn't motivate the people in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado to come out and vote for him in large numbers, and this is indicative of how November will go. Just another uninspiring RINO with no passion or enthusiasm in the campaign.

[JediJones]

Iowa and Nevada were caucus states too. What makes the Minnesota and Colorado contests different that makes them “beauty contests?”

[patriot08]

Rick Perry ‘suspended’ his candidacy.
Doesn’t that mean he could get back in?

[jersey117]

I’ll bet they are too. Can anyone jump in at a brokered convention?

[JediJones]

Yeah. I think I read that it took 6 rounds of voting to finalize a nominee in 1940. I think we can expect that Newt and Rick would try to tell their delegates to vote for whichever one of them has more delegates as President, with the other one agreeing to take V.P. But if their combined delegates aren’t far off from Romney’s total delegates, I would say some defectors from Rick’s camp are likely to give us Romney. If the first vote fails and splits pretty evenly among the 3 or 4 candidates, then maybe some other establishment-preferred candidate will be inserted into the mix.