In a sketch last weekend following Mitt Romney's win in Michigan, "Saturday Night Live" had its Romney character boast that it was another instance of voters saying of him, "Eh, I guess."
"Eh, I guess" looks to be the motto he'll have to try to ride to the nomination. It was an "eh" night for Romney, although he avoided catastrophe by pulling out a razor-thin win in Ohio where he was trailing most of the night.
Otherwise, he won one state where he used to be governor (Massachusetts), a small Northeastern state (Vermont), an essentially uncontested Southern state (Virginia), a heavily Mormon state out West (Idaho) and Alaska. In Virginia, he couldn't get to 60 percent against just Ron Paul. Rarely has a candidate seemed so inevitable and so weak at the same time.
Byron York writes:
No one senses Romney's weakness more acutely than Santorum and his advisers. They're convinced they could beat Romney one-on-one, and for that reason they are increasingly frustrated by Newt Gingrich's continued presence in the race. Gingrich, of course, easily won his home state of Georgia Tuesday night but did not do well in Tennessee and Oklahoma, as he had hoped. Now, Santorum is aiming to beat Gingrich in next week's Alabama and Mississippi contests, in the hopes of finally defeating the former speaker, or at least forcing him into total irrelevance.
"We'd never ask anybody to get out of this race," Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley said on election night. "But you look at the numbers: If Newt were out of this race, we'd be winning these states by ten points."Erin McPike reports:
Romney’s showing in the state could be a bad omen for him in the fall if he is GOP the nominee. Ohio Democrats have out-organized and out-hustled their Republican counterparts already, even holding their own election night event at the Ohio Democratic Party headquarters.
“Tonight Mitt Romney managed to eek [sic] out an embarrassingly narrow victory in Ohio and the race came at an extremely high cost to his candidacy,” Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern said in a statement.
Redfern's statement makes no sense. Obama lost the 2008 Ohio primary by a very substantial margin. He won the state in the fall.
