Republican establishment types, watching the party’s White House chances shrink with each additional day the ugly GOP nomination race endures, pray for the fat lady to sing.
Sadly for them, she’s barely warming up. In the meantime, the GOP candidates are inflicting so much damage on each other as to make them all unelectable in November.
Mitt Romney seems headed for a convincing victory in Tuesday’s Arizona primary, giving him all of the state’s 29 delegates. But he will be lucky to finish the night ahead of Rick Santorum in Michigan, a state the Detroit-bred Mr. Romney ought to sweep.
A strong showing by the ex-Pennsylvania senator in Michigan, where he could get a majority of the state’s 30 delegates based on that state’s complicated formula for awarding them, would buttress his campaign as he heads to Ohio for its March 6 primary.
And as if that does not give Mr. Romney enough to worry about, a week from now Newt Gingrich could be back from the dead with a Super Tuesday sweep of the South.
In short, the longer Mr. Santorum, Mr. Gingrich and Ron Paul continue to rack up delegates in states that award them based on their share of the vote, the longer it will take Mr. Romney to accumulate the 1,144 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination.
It is now conceivable that no candidate will have met the magic number by the time Republicans gather for their August convention. It could be a disaster in the making.
“The general election prospects for Republicans certainly would be better served if more focus was spent on Obama’s policies and the failure of those policies,” former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour said on the weekend.
Mr. Barbour, an ex-chairman of Republican National Committee, may have knowingly doomed his future nomination prospects with a slew of controversial pardons before leaving the governor’s mansion last month. But he knows what it takes to win elections.
“Our side might not offer a bold enough and specific enough and constructive enough – and I would say inclusive enough – alternative” to President Barack Obama, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels added on Saturday.
That amounted to a blanket condemnation of Mr. Romney (neither bold nor terribly specific) and Mr. Santorum and Mr. Gingrich (neither of whom are very inclusive).
Still, you do not need to be bold or specific to become President.
Mr. Santorum disqualifies himself with his antagonist approach to every problem. If he is not alienating centrist voters with his extreme views on contraception and abortion, he downright scares them with his call for a marriage of church and state.
“What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?” Mr. Santorum told ABC News on Sunday. “That makes me throw up.”
A day earlier, he called Mr. Obama a “snob” for suggesting every American get some postsecondary education.
“There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day, that put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor,” Mr. Santorum said at a campaign stop in Michigan.
If his tactic is transparent – appealing to the extreme evangelical and anti-intellectual wings of the Republican base that turn out in GOP primaries – it is also short-sighted.
His traction with the hardliners may give Mr. Santorum the power to drag out the GOP race for months, but it will doom him and the party once the Republican race is over.
When the fat lady sings in November, she risks sounding an awful lot like Al Green.
