Super Tuesday Musings

I spent the evening watching the ten state primaries' returns and commentary on Fox while reading my Twitter feed [is that what it is called?] Twitter was much more fun, though 140 character posts alone would have deprived me of the opportunity to see Chris Wallace, Karl Rove and Joe Trippi wearing baseball caps and calling themselves the 'space cowboys'.

Mitt Romney won six states [VA, VT, MA, ID, OH, AK] Rick Santorum won three [OK, TN, ND] and Newt Gingrich won one [his home state of GA]

Romney is being called the 'frail front runner', which seems odd since he won most of the delegates on Super Tuesday. He has won 13 states so far, Santorum has won 7, Gingrich only 2. In theory, Santorum still has a chance - 34 of 56 total primaries and caucuses are yet to be decided. The problem is momentum. Neither candidate seems to be able to break through. Romney has enough of a campaign infrastructure to keep going, but Santorum is not even on the ballot in some of the states due to his lack of a national campaign organization.

Romney currently has over twice as many delegates as anyone else [somewhere between 361, 404,or 415, depending on how you calculate them] but out of
2,286 total delegates available a candidate must accumulate 1,144,and only 782 have been allotted so far.

I like Rick Santorum. He has been waaay outspent so far, and that makes a difference. Romney is better organized and better financed, but that doesn't mean he has a corner on good ideas. I worry that Romney will too easily compromise, and that Santorum will not compromise enough to make headway against the big government behemoth facing us. Romney seems much more comfortable with government solutions in general, which troubles me.

There is pressure on Gingrich to get out of the race so votes go to Santorum, but he says no. Ron Paul's determination to promote a strict constitutionalism will keep him in the race right through the convention in August. Mississippi, Alabama and Kansas hold their primaries on Saturday. Maybe the picture will be more clear after that, but as far as I'm concerned, any of these guys would be better than another 4 years of Obama.

A bit of bright news in all this for my pro-life friends: in Oklahoma last night Randall Terry ran in the Democratic primary and actually won a delegate that would have otherwise gone to President Obama. That made me smile more than the silly baseball caps.