When Facing a Category Five Disaster, the Smart Man Evacuates!

The arrangements were made well before we gave much thought to the Presidential primary calendar, and so while my home state of Michigan has been engulfed in a Republican Presidential Primary storm of truly catastrophic proportions, I have been spending a very pleasant fortnight in the Florida Keys. Although I can't take credit for any particular foresight in my narrow escape, I have appreciated a bit of distance as Michigan absorbed a direct hit from the 2012 GOP primary.

While Rick Santorum addressed a Friday night fish-fry crowd at the Catholic church just two miles from my house, I fried up a pan of freshly caught grunt and porgy from that day's charter fishing expedition. While Mitt Romney praised the height of the trees in Michigan for their rightness, I have contemplated palms of varying height and species, being careful not to set my beach chair beneath the coconut trees.

Yet I have also been strangely connected to it all by the world of electronics.  I get the Detroit Free Press on my Kindle every morning and have time to genuinely read it.  I have chances to check in with some of my other local news sources -- The Oakland Press, the Spinal Column, etc. -- to catch their take, which mostly shows the local news impact of candidate appearances.

My Facebook feed has been filled with little links to various Michigan primary events and non-events. My e-mail inbox is cluttered with a variety of political spams all with one opinion or another on where and how I should vote in today's primary, never mind that I'm a Democrat.

I shudder to think of the pile of robocall messages that have undoubtedly been left on our home phone. We forgot to bring our remote PIN to collect the messages, so the damage will be there waiting for us.  I'm sure that dire SuperPAC ads clutter the local shows recorded on our DVR during our absence. It's a bit like evacuating in the face of an oncoming hurricane and going home afterwards, unsure of what if any damage has been done.

I have a friend who is a rabid Tea Partier. As of 10:30 am on Election Day, I have yet to see any sign that he has made up his mind about who he will vote for. I've called him my "Tea Party Canary in a Coal Mine" because I think he's a pretty good representative of the problem that Tea Party base -- so crucial in the GOP's 2010 victories -- faces with this whittled-down cast of characters. None of them are really the right candidate to carry their message.

I've been of the opinion that the conservative GOP base would eventually move to Rick Santorum because the alternatives in Mitt Romney ("The Chief Architect of Romneycare") and Newt Gingrich ("The Earmark King of Cobb County") were so unappealing. But Santorum has taken his time in the spotlight to remind us that his Google problem didn't arise in a vacuum. It came about because he repeatedly went out of his way to vilify homosexuality to further his social agenda.

In Iowa Santorum spread a pretty good economic message based on a revival of manufacturing.  Instead of pounding that message in Michigan -- ground zero of the American manufacturing collapse -- he seems to have been unable to resist the alluring catnip of extreme social conservatism. While some of his remarks this week may have played well to an evangelical and Catholic base, they seem almost certain to haunt him if he emerges as the eventual nominee. It turns out that access to contraception is popular among the general voting public.

I used to think that Mitt Romney would at least be a competent administrator if he ended up in the Oval Office. But after watching him speak on Michigan topics for several weeks, I've decided he might be the worst of the choices because as near as I can tell all he stands for is a belief in his own competence. Worse yet, he seems to think that belief entitles him to take whatever position is most convenient for the room he is addressing. There are plenty of political offices in which competence without a moral, ethical, or philosophical compass is a positive boon, but President of the United States is not one of them.

At this point if I was a Tea Partier I'd probably vote for Ron Paul and hope for a brokered convention that might produce a more appealing nominee than any of this crowd.  I'm curious to hear what my Tea Party friend decided.

Fortunately for me, I am faced with none of those choices. I will be voting for Obama in the Democratic caucuses in May and again in November. However, after my near-miss of an up-close look at this year's contenders, I'm beginning to root for a brokered GOP convention, too. Not because I think that will produce a weaker candidate for Obama to beat, but because at this point I truly think I'd prefer not to see any of these four guys get as close as the November ballot. This is probably not the reaction they meant to elicit by campaigning so hard in my back yard, but it is my reaction nonetheless. At this point I'm rooting for "None of the Above" and glad to be 1,500 miles away.

C'mon, GOP. I'm not rooting for you. But I am at least rooting for you to produce a responsible alternative.

Tim Pawlenty, come back. All is forgiven!

P.S. A Romney victory today in Arizona is a foregone conclusion. But how about a prediction for today in Michigan? The polling is absolutely dead even, but my gut tells me that Santorum will eke out a narrow statewide margin over Romney and probably win something like eight of 14 Congressional districts, which would give him something like an 18-12 delegate advantage over Romney. This cycle's Republican gerrymander of the Congressional districts was especially strange, so a really hip prediction might include something like a Ron Paul victory in one of the packed Detroit districts, or a district/general split that ended up with more delegates going to the statewide loser. But those outcomes seem less likely.

What'll be even more interesting is to see how an outcome that's likely to vary by a few thousand votes either way is spun by the media and the campaigns. A narrow Romney victory will have him back on the inevitability track, while a Santorum squeaker would be interpreted as the wheels having fallen off the Romney wagon altogether. Neither narrative should be taken too seriously by anybody, especially given the likelihood that the difference between the two will likely be how many Democrats cross over to cast a vote, since they have no meaningful primary of their own.