Howdy from San Diego

Howdy all, from sunny San Diego.  (Well, okay, from mostly foggy San Diego down here by the beach this time of year, but the sun came out for a few hours this morning, so I feel justified.)  This is a pretty long post for what I had originally intended as a quick update, but I assure you that you'll want to read all the way to the end.  Alas, like Moby Dick, the worthwhile end will be much better if you read all the blubber that proceeds it, so without further ado here we go...

If you're wondering why I'm out here in San Diego, it's because I'm attending this year's American Society for Indexing (ASI) conference, which is here at the Bahia Resort Hotel on Mission Bay. Yes, that's the conference that my mother and ex-sister-in-law once described as "the most boring conference ever" after looking at the detailed schedule one year.  In fact, a friend of mine just said that he'd rather attend "International Watching Paint Drying Conference in the Mojave Desert in July."

Those people, however, are crazy. Because for the next three glorious days, I'm not going to have to start a discussion of my job by saying, "You know when you want to look something up in a book, so you go to the back and see that list of stuff that's in the book, that's an index...."  I may even toss around phrases like "polyhierarchical thesauri", "letter-by-letter vs. word-by-word", and "systematically controlled and validated metadata" if I'm feeling especially saucy.

Sadly, Monique is not in attendance at this year's ASI conference. As has been the case with every previous one I've attended (Boston, Toronto, and Minneapolis) she is buried in a book on deadline, so yet again there was really no reasonable way for her to shake loose, much though she wanted to.  I think we may have finally learned the lesson of ECDI's publishing scheduling, which is that they almost always have a large book due in May, which means that nobody anywhere gets to see Monique in April.

So, Monique is once again the victim of a book deadline that keeps her from a fun trip. This is sad, but not as sad as the time a book deadline meant she had to bail out of the Detroit Rugby Football Club's trip to the French Riviera for the 2007 World Cup.  And no matter how many times that I claim that I was the real victim of that deadline snafu ("Hey, I was going to spend the week with my wife on the French Riviera, and instead I ended up sharing a room with a smelly old rugby player! I'm the victim here!") I might be willing to concede that she got the worst of that book deadline debacle, too.

All of this means that I headed West bachelor-style to chit-chat about indexing for three or four days while Monique and Katie the Beagle stayed home with their noses diligently to the grindstone. I actually flew out here yesterday, since the welcome reception and address are tonight, and I knew that waking up at 5 am Eastern time to make a flight that would get me here in time would leave me a gibbering mess this evening, and the ensuing jet lag would probably leave me a still-gibbering mess when I need to be coherent Friday morning to host my panel.  Also, I figured it would good to have a few hours today to check in on my work e-mail and finish my admittedly modest preparations for my panel.

After I arrived at the airport yesterday I dug up the right Super Saver shuttle from the airport (ahh, the frugal employee when travelling on the company dime), arrived at the hotel, and eventually got sent down the parking lot towards Room 120, the door of which I found on the parking-lot side of a long row of semi-attached suites and cottage that stretched along the bay.

This seems a good time to digress for a moment to mention to those who don't know that I actually lived in the Mission Beach / Pacific Beach area of San Diego for a few months back in 1993 after I finally stumbled out of college ("... and good riddance!" I believe it said on my diploma) and decided that being penniless and unemployed on the beach in San Diego was a heck of a lot better than being penniless and unemployed in the Adirondack Mountains all winter.  In Pacific Beach I didn't actually have a room or anything, but my old college roomie Jimmy Zaun and his roommates very graciously let me pitch my tent behind their house while I was there, as long as I didn't mind sharing the yard with their dog.  (Which worked out okay ... until that sad day when the dog ate my tent while everybody was away and I became penniless and tentless. That was what life coaches like to call "a low point.")

Other than one weekend trip Monique and I made out here for a rugby tournament a few years ago, pretty much my entire experience of staying in San Diego involves sleeping in a tent and sharing a yard with a dog behind a house in Pacific Beach. Keep that in mind as my frame of reference.

And so, when I made my reservations I told the reservation clerk that I didn't need anything on the bayfront. The parking-lot side would be fine.  Really, she should just stick me in whatever room came at the low group conference rate and was convenient for them.  All I really plan to do in the room is to sleep and maybe do a bit of work. Frankly, if a tent had wifi and a shower, that would probably do just as well for me.

As it turns out, Room 120 was a nice step up from a tent!

Here's the bed. I made it my office while I answered e-mails and did some conference prep. Check out the commanding view of the parking lot behind the bed, per my request.

The dresser drawer and TV.

The closet. It has an iron and ironing board, which was my only real worry since I knew I'd have to attempt some ironing after folding my shirts into a suitcase.

The adjoining door to the room on the bayside. Really, my only beef with the set up was that they leave the TVs on in these rooms and set to the "hotel features" channel.  Since there was nobody in the bayside room last night, it was on all night and when I woke around 2 am I thought to myself that it was a pity I couldn't sneak in and mute it because I'd tired a bit of the incessant background music.

Mind you, the last motel room I stayed in was at the Scottish Inn in Unadilla, Georgia, when we broke down coming back from the Keys. That room was about 15 feet from a very busy freight-train track and an at-grade crossing, which meant that the entire room rattled when trains went by and we got to hear a very loud train whistle (two short, one long) at least once an hour, if not more often.  A little looped description of the many lovely amenities of the Bahia Resort hotel was paradise by comparison.

There were only two other little oddities I should mention about Room 120: no water glasses and no coffee maker for the morning.  Hey, the Scottish Inn in Unadilla didn't have a coffee maker, either, but this was a pretty nice place to have cheaped out on that front.  And at least the Scottish Inn had a few plastic cups for our tooth-brushing and water-drinking pleasures.

However, I'm a pretty low-maintenance hotel guest.  This may come from having worked in a couple resort hotels as a bellhop when I was younger. My sister Susan also worked in a high-end resort, and has fabulous tales of annoying, spoiled, demanding guests and why you should be nice to your reservations clerk on the phone. Anyway, I'm a heck of a lot more inclined to empathize with hotel employees under siege from guests than I am to whine about a coffee maker or a water glass.  I had a water bottle with me that would do just fine when refilled with tap water. And if I had to head out of the room in the morning to find coffee, that would be just fine and a great excuse to get me the heck out of the room.

I took full possession of Room 120: set up the laptop and iPad on wi-fi, checked in with the work e-mail, and even unpacked the suitcase and put things in drawers -- I am sooooo civilized and happy not to be living out of a backpack in my tent! Then I headed out to have a walk up the Mission Beach / Pacific Beach boardwalk to Crystal Pier, and possibly to find a tacqueria to grab a quick dinner.  After a lovely dinner of two fish tacos and a veggie burrito I walked back to the hotel and good ol' Room 120, checked my fantasy baseball scores, and called it a night.

Walking up and down the boardwalk was about all I could afford the first time I lived here, but it's one of the world's great free activities. And most of the time I couldn't afford a fish taco or a veggie burrito, so two fish tacos and a veggie burrito for dinner felt downright decadent. To be honest, as I walked around last night I was feeling great about thinking how far I'd come in the 19 years since I first washed up on this shore. I'd gone from unemployed, penniless, homeless, and tentless to bust my way back up into the middle class and become a gainfully employed, semi-respectable citizen with a fabulous wife, a little house on a lake in Michigan, and a heck of a nice little room here at a very nice hotel for the weekend.

It was a good feeling, even if I was feeling just a bit smug about it all.  And sometimes it's nice to feel just a bit smug, too.

This morning I got up, did a bit of work on the laptop, and then headed out to find some coffee in the hotel lobby.  Coffee in hand I walked back down to the beach, read the paper, and watched the waves for a while.  Eventually I grabbed some lunch -- two fish tacos and a veggie burrito again, this time at a different tacqueria that was closer though not as good as the one I ate at last night -- and headed back to Room 120 to check in with the work e-mail again and finish my panel prep.

(No beach photos yet because I didn't bring the camera on either of my expeditions beyond Room 120)

Here comes the part that was worth reading all the way through this long blog post.

While I was sitting on the bed working with laptop in lap, the maid knocked on the door. I told her to go ahead, that it wouldn't bother me, and she set to work with some fresh towels.  Then it occurred to me that while she was here I should ask her about getting a couple of water glasses.  She says it's no problem, and opens up the door to the adjoining room on the bayside.

"That's funny, I thought. The adjoining door was unlocked." And then I realized that all last night while the TV over there was blaring the hotel features at me, I could've just opened the door and muted it, since nobody was in that room.

Then it occurs to me that I could do that very thing right now, while the door was open and the maid was digging me up a couple of water glasses.

To think is to act, so I zipped through the door where she's pulled out a couple of water glasses from the adjoining room's kitchenette...

... which was in fact, the kitchenette of my bayside suite.

That's right.  I had entered a one-bedroom bayside suite through the bedroom door, which connects to the outside; assumed that the door to the main part of the suite was just a door to somebody else's adjoining room; and for my first twenty-four hours in San Diego I was feeling smug about good ol' Room 120.  Which it turns out is Bayside Suite 120.

The living room area.

The kitchenette.  With a coffee maker, I hasten to add.

The "Welcome" fruit plate, with delicately carved seashells of white and milk chocolate.

The patio. (Here on the Patio Boat blog we approve strongly of patios!)

The bay view.

More bay view.

... with the Mission Beach roller coaster in the background.

Yeah, I'm an idiot.

I guess when I told the reservations clerk that she could put me wherever was cheap and convenient for her, it was convenient for her to put me in a bayside suite at the conference group rate.  Remember the part earlier when I told you to always be nice to your reservation clerk on the phone?  Yeah, always be nice to your reservation clerk on the phone.

So, I don't think I'm going to get to feel smug about much of anything for a while because I'm obviously a blithering idiot.  But I do think I'm going to like Suite 120.

More from the ASI conference coming soon, when and if I get a chance.  Perhaps I'll expand on the wonders of polyhierarchical thesauri....

We now return you to your regularly scheduled beagle haiku, already in progress.

The loyal beagle,
Curled up next to Monique,
Dreaming of rabbits.

Sayonara, Santorum. Buenos Noches, Newt.

Arsen Darnay asked me Sunday why I hadn't written any posts on the Republican primary since March 20th. The answer was twofold:

1) I blew my free time for the past few weeks on my Rotisserie baseball drafts instead of blogging.  I'm in three fantasy baseball leagues this year, which is just freaking nuts. And while I did write a four-post 10,000-word self-evaluation of my draft in the HQ Forum Masters League for a draft discussion on the Baseball HQ forums, I can't possibly imagine any of the ol' Patio Boat crowd possibly wants to read it.

(I'll prove that right now. If anybody asks for it, I'll be glad to copy it and paste it up here.  But only if you all promise to read it in its entirety then comment in depth afterwards. ... Do you hear that sound, blogosphere? 'Tis the sound of sparse crickets amid sheer silence. My post-draft manifesto shall apparently remain unread by the broader world.)

2) More importantly, nothing really happened in the last three weeks.  So what was there really to comment on?  Think back and compare the news of the last three weeks to the Weirdsville Carnival that was unleashed on Iowa just a few short months ago.

So, the primary's been in a bit of a holding pattern as Romney continued to put the squeeze on with greater resources and fundraising, while the party establishment accelerated its concession to the inevitable with endorsements, increasing structural support, and calls for Gingrich and Santorum to shut things down.  This week the political math finally finished its work as Gingrich scaled down his campaign and Santorum suspended operations altogether.

Newt Gingrich essentially conceded the campaign a few days ago, saying that he is now campaigning with a skeleton staff to "have an impact on the platform."  His campaign has long since lost its fundraising clout and is now $4.5 million in debt, and my guess is that the rest of this campaign will essentially be a campaign to pay off that $4.5 million.

How broke is Gingrich's campaign? He just bounced his $500 check for his Utah Primary filing fee.  Meanwhile, his health-care think tank just filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy with less than $100,000 in assets and up to $10 million in debt.

The good news here is that we've all gained valuable insight into why Newt thought that additional tax cuts for the wealthy would fix the budget deficit.  He's apparently very bad at math that involves dollar signs.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum's window of opportunity to win the nomination closed in mid-March.  After his surprise wins in Colorado and Minnesota on Feb. 7, he had finally emerged as the candidate who was not Mitt Romney.

"Not being Mitt Romney" has been an enormously popular position in this year's GOP primary. It's rather like being the backup quarterback on an NFL team with an iffy starter.  Everybody looks at the starter, says, "Meh," then professes undying love for the backup, sure that if he could only get off the bench he would prove the coaches wrong and lead the team to the Super Bowl.

Except then you watch the backup finally get into a game and it turns out that he really is worse than the guy with the first-team job.  After February 7 Santorum became the presidential candidate equivalent of Tyler Palko or Caleb Haney, ineptly tossing inexplicable interceptions and fumbling away opportunities. In the case of Santorum's campaign, his campaign's ineptitude ranged from repeated failures to file delegate slates in important states to the inexplicable decision to campaign for days in Puerto Rico on a platform of "you should speak English" while the Illinois primary hung in the balance.

Santorum went on to lose Puerto Rico to Romney by 88-13, the sort of final score that one expects to see in the Monday morning box scores when Curtis Painter or Luke McCown takes the field.

Tactical ineptitude aside, Santorum also tried to overtake Romney by shifting the campaign ground away from economic issues to social conservatism, a shift that may have done some lasting damage to the image of the entire GOP, especially with women.

Santorum surged to his surprise win in Iowa by projecting the image of a genial fellow in a sweater vest who wanted to return us to the good times of the 50's.  But as he tried to overtake Romney, Santorum decided that if a teaspoon of social conservatism was good campaign medicine, a two-ton helping of it was just the right dose. By late February he was still projecting the image of a fellow who wanted to return us to the 50s ... the pre-Reformation 1350s.

Worse yet for the Republican Party's general election hopes, Mitt Romney happily followed him out on that far-right limb, providing soundbites aplenty that I'm sure we will see replayed over and over again in September and October.

After Santorum missed his opportunities in Michigan, Alaska, Ohio, and Virginia the end game was upon us. By the time he began using "Reagan in 1976" analogy as his rallying cry in Illinois and Wisconsin, it was clear to everybody that even Rick Santorum understood that he'd missed his chance at the nomination.

And so ... what more was there for me to say until today, when the inevitable became official?

P.S. One final tidbit of sheer speculation.  I wouldn't be surprised if we learn one day that the last straw for Santorum was polling that showed him increasingly likely to lose to Romney in his home state of Pennsylvania.  For the last few weeks it's been clear that Santorum's campaign has been more about 2016 than 2012.  At this point Santorum has done enough to position himself well for another run in 2016 if Romney fails to win in November.  But losing his home state to a candidate who goes on to lose the general election would be a real setback, one that really could hurt him when it comes time to line up backers in four years. Just a thought.

Coming attractions: This might be about it for me in terms of blogging about this year's presidential campaign, though I might have an additional post or two looking back at the odd factual and political bubble in which this primary campaign was conducted. I might also have a few thoughts to share about SuperPACs.

For those who may be new here, the ol' Patio Boat has always been more of a friends-and-family blog than a hotbed of political commentary, and I aim to keep it that way.  So I'll probably keep the Patio Boat out of the heart of the impending partisan storm (though I'll be spending plenty of my own time campaigning for Obama's re-election.)

For example, it would be pretty easy for me to put together a long and rather pointed analysis of Mitt Romney's utter lack of conviction on any issue.  But frankly, I can't do better than his own campaign adviser's Etch-A-Sketch analogy.  And I guarantee that there will be no lack of clever commentary on that topic 'twixt now and November.

But it's been fun to write about this year's Republican presidential primary because our primary process is so strange; because it involved such an incredibly odd and colorful cast of characters; and because I didn't have a dog in this race, which left me free to comment impartially on the whole strange process.

And while I won't be steering the Patio Boat into the general election waters, this won't mark an end to political content here.  Now that the post-census redistricting process is wrapping up, I expect I'll return to that topic soon -- especially since I have some things to say that will be of interest to my friends and family members across the political spectrum.

Gerrymandering is disenfranchising you and wrecking our democracy.  And we can fix it.

A Farewell to (QB) Arms: A Patio Boat Offseason Special

In today's special contribution from our Indianapolis Colts haiku correspondent, Mary Campbell-Droze comes face-to-face with the reality that 17 syllables can not contain her sorrow:

it is momentous,now that you have deemed 

[cf e.e. cummings "it is at moments after i have dreamed" from 'Sonnets-Unrealities,' Tulips & Chimneys)

it is momentous,now that you have deemed
that denver is the apple of your eye,
when(being silly-willy)i had dreamed

coaching indy's where your heart would lie;
momentous when my coltish conscience scolds

the confounding decision that you made
(it involved much cussing)but silence holds
some respite as the news begins to fade;

momentous when your once illustrious arm
throws and with consternation,you then find
that mile-high's cold while lucas was warm:

one thing momentous comes to mind

turning to the colts game on tv
we'll miss your fight for that final mvp.

--Mary Campbell-Droze

Quick note on today's Illinois primary

You can mark down March 19, 2012, as the day the Republican Presidential Primary ended.  It's over.  The slog will continue through June, but Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee.

My number one reason for declaring the race over is not that Rick Santorum is down by double-digits in the Illinois polls, has again failed to field a full slate of delegates, has failed to persuade Newt Gingrich to depart the race, and has continued to fall further behind Romney in the delegate count -- though those are all persuasive pieces of evidence.

Instead it's that I heard a snippet of one of his Illinois speeches from yesterday in which he drew the a direct comparison between this campaign and Ronald Reagan's 1976 campaign.  So, let the record show that Santorum 2012 shut down operations on March 19, 2012, and Santorum 2016 begins today.

This might make tonight's results and speeches interesting for a couple of reasons.  Santorum will need to provide a rationale for continuing to campaign to the convention while reaching out to those Republicans who will want him to pack it in.  The Republican Party has a long track record of nominating the second-place finisher from the previous cycle, so Santorum has good reason to think that if he can finish a strong second, he will have a clear shot at the 2016 nomination. But he may want to be cautious about how much further damage he does to Mitt Romney along the way. Campaigning through to the convention isn't a bad strategy if he has truly set his sights on 2016 because it will allow him to build the contacts and structures in states that may bear fruit in four years.

If Santorum mentions Reagan 1976 or spends most of his speech tonight focusing on Obama instead of Romney, you can take that as a 2012 concession.

Romney's speech could also be interesting, though we're more likely to see his standard stump than anything else. Romney has been trying to pivot to the general election for some time now, but Santorum has continually dragged him out onto the far-right wing of the Republican Party on social issues.  Romney will soon want to convince one and all that he didn't mean all the things he had to say to win the Republican nomination.  But that backpeddle may be especially tricky for a candidate who already has credibility problems with his stands on the issues.  If nothing else, this primary campaign has certainly provided the Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign with hours of Romney videotape to cherry pick for advertisements this fall.

So, I see little potential for a surprising outcome in Illinois, but we could have a couple of potentially significant speeches tonight.

Gingrich on the Alabama & Mississippi results: "It's only a flesh wound!"

Just a little this n'that after the results of Tuesday's voting in Alabama, Mississippi, Hawaii, and American Samoa.

1) Headlines vs. Delegate Count -- If I may summarize the vast sweeping headlines that followed: "Santorum triumphs in Mississippi and Alabama! Gingrich campaign shattered. Romney finishes third"

So if we all agree on the big loser (Gingrich) who was the big winner on Tuesday?  Here are the results by vote percentage, with the winner in bold. (All stats courtesy of the New York Times primary results pages.):

Alabama -- Gingrich, 29.3%; Paul, 5.0%; Romney, 29.0%; Santorum, 34.5%.
Mississippi -- Gingrich, 31.2%; Paul, 4.4%; Romney, 30.6%; Santorum, 32.8%.
Hawaii -- Gingrich, 11.0%; Paul, 18.3%; Romney, 45.4%; Santorum, 25.3%.
American Samoa -- Gingrich, 0.0%; Paul, 0.0%; Romney, 100.0%; Santorum, 0.0%.

(I have no idea how American Samoa ended up at 100%, but presumably it's a side-effect of some sort of caucus consensus rule.)

So, if you look at those results, Santorum rolls over the opposition in the GOP Southern heartland of Alabama and Mississipi, while Romney manages to capture a couple more island contests.

Now, let's see how that translates in delegates:

Alabama -- Gingrich, 12; Paul, 0; Romney, 11; Santorum, 19.
Mississippi -- Gingrich, 12; Paul, 0; Romney, 14; Santorum, 13.
Hawaii -- Gingrich, 0; Paul, 1; Romney, 9; Santorum, 4.
American Samoa -- Gingrich, 0; Paul, 0; Romney, 9; Santorum, 0.
Total -- Gingrich, 24; Paul, 1; Romney, 43; Santorum, 36.

So, even though Santorum won the headlines, Mitt Romney won more delegates on Tuesday, extending his lead over Santorum by another seven delegates.  And although he finished third in the popular vote, Romney (14) also won more delegates in Mississippi than Santorum (13) or Gingrich (12) by dint of winning more Congressional districts.  In terms of their main goal in these primaries (win enough delegates to clinch the nomination) Romney had the best day.  However, the news cycle for the next 24 hours for Romney was mostly filled with news about his third-place finishes on Tuesday night. The Hawaii and Samoan results came in long after the next day's news banners had already been chosen.

The takeaway? The headlines and cable-news banners in this race aren't always reflective of what really happened. There was truth to the damage that Gingrich's campaign suffered badly from the results. But if you want to know which campaign is really winning this thing, pay attention to the delegate counts.

2) Newt Gingrich is a dead parrot -- I came across a bit on MSNBC last night comparing Gingrich at this point to The Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, especially in claiming that the Alabama and Mississippi results were "only a flesh wound." That comparison has a lot of merit. Gingrich's speech following his disappointing results was a classic piece of denialism from a candidate whose candidacy has now reached its end. He continued to talk about the results as if they were a moral victory of some sort, but if you watch the video and look at the expressions on the faces in the background, they tell the true story.

(Actually, my favorite part was when he said that the "elite media" keeps trying to claim that the race is over and Romney has this thing wrapped up. In truth, the media would love nothing more than for this race to go all the way to a brokered convention. A brokered convention for either party is the dream event of every "elite media" political reporter who has ever wielded a keyboard or microphone.)

Tuesday was a mortal wound for the Gingrich candidacy, even if he manages to convince his backers to keep funding some sort of skeleton campaign that will limp through another few weeks. Campaigns run on hope, and the only plausible path to the nomination for Newt Gingrich included a tight hold on the South and victories in Alabama and Mississippi.  If Newt Gingrich couldn't win in Alabama and Mississippi, he can't win the nomination. The pressure on Gingrich to drop out will now grow quickly.

3) Going forward, the path and the math -- Nate Silver did a really good piece in his fivethirtyeight.com blog last week about the delegate math going forward that's very much worth reading.

The big takeaway from that analysis for my purposes is that the delegate math to get Rick Santorum to 1,144 (the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination) is getting pretty steep. Santorum trails Romney by nearly 250 delegates at this point.  Since Romney's support has been steady and genuinely strong among some groups (suburban voters, Mormons, etc.) Romney seems very likely to continue to pick up significant numbers of delegates throughout the campaign. To catch and pass Romney and secure 1,144 delegates, Santorum would have to begin winning significantly more delegates than Romney in a lot of places. To do that Santorum would need to change the dynamic of the election very soon, since we are nearing the halfway point of this primary.

A more likely path for Santorum would be winning enough delegates to prevent Romney from clinching, then emerging from a brokered convention as the candidate.  In some ways Gingrich might serve the purpose of forcing a brokered campaign if he could manage to draw delegates from both the Romney and Santorum campaigns. But with his viability at an end, his significant impact will dwindle. .

If Gingrich stays in the race, the math continues to favor Romney eventually securing enough delegates to clinch. The only likely event to change the current pattern would be if Gingrich were to drop out of the race and give Santorum a strong endorsement that caused his followers to shift significantly towards Santorum. The first step towards that was a Gingrich defeat in Alabama and Mississippi. The real question now is how long it takes Newt Gingrich to realize that any chance he had at the nomination is now genuinely over, and what Gingrich will do once he realizes that.

The only event coming up that could conceivably give Gingrich as good a chance to win as he had in Alabama and Mississippi is the Louisiana primary (46 delegates) on March 24. But I see no reason to think he will win in Louisiana as a diminished candidate when he couldn't win in Alabama or Mississippi when he was still viable. After the votes in Missouri (52 delegates, March 17), Puerto Rico (23 delegates, March 18), and Illinois (69 delegates, March 20.)  If it takes Gingrich until April to decide to drop out of the race, the math for Santorum could be truly daunting indeed.

Thoughts on Super Tuesday and Beyond

The Super Tuesday results pretty closely met expectations. In some ways the next couple of weeks are likely to be more interesting, as Newt Gingrich seems likely to come face-to-face with elimination.  Here are a few thoughts on what happened yesterday, and what's coming up next:

1) A good day overall for Romney -- Ultimately, the primary process is about winning delegates, and Mitt Romney won nearly half of the 466 delegates up for grabs in the eleven states that voted yesterday. (All totals courtesy of the delegate tracker on Nate Silver's Fivethirty.com blog.)

	Gngrch	Paul	Romny	Sntorm	Unallocatd
Alaska	3	6	8	7	3
Ga.	46	0	13	2	15
Idaho	0	0	32	0	0
Mass.	0	0	41	0	0
N.D.	2	8	7	11	0
Ohio	0	0	35	21	10
Okla.	13	1	13	14	2
Tenn.	8	0	10	25	15
Vt.	0	4	9	4	0
Va.	0	3	43	0	3
Wyo.	0	1	5	0	23
Totals	72	23	216	84	71

So far Romney has captured 415 (55.7%) of the 745 delegates that have been awarded to date. That puts him on pace to wrap up the election before the convention, though he may not cross the 1,144 delegate threshold needed to secure a guaranteed first-ballot nomination until fairly late in the process.

2) Organization matters -- Rick Santorum failed to get on the ballot in Virginia or to file a full delegate slate in Ohio.  Those two issues probably cost him dearly. He might've netted anywhere from 10 to 50 delegates from Romney's total if his campaign had just had its administrative issues together.  Successful campaigns take more than just a few speeches and some ads.

Super Tuesday is the point at which the campaign scales up from a single state or two at a time to become a truly national campaign. Administrative issues may seem to be a minor point, but one of the things the primary process does well is to judge a candidate's fitness to organize a national campaign. Romney's 2008 experience and resources are going to serve him well over the next couple of months. If Rick Santorum is to successfully compete for the nomination, he'll need to avoid any further unforced errors.

3) The Fat Lady is practicing her Newt Gingrich aria -- Gingrich managed to win his home state of Georgia, but fared poorly in the other 10 states, where his best results were third-place finishes in Tennessee and Oklahoma, the sorts of states he would need to win to have a real chance at the nomination. At this point he has won only two of 22 states that have voted. His path back to relevance included capturing Southern states, especially Texas where he was endorsed by Texas Governor and former presidential candidate Rick Perry.  Unfortunately for the Gingrich comeback strategy, Texas had to move its primary all the way back to May 29 due to problems in settling redistricting questions.

A loss in Georgia would have finished Gingrich. Winning several states in addition to Georgia would have put his campaign back in business. Now he is going to have to sweep the next couple of Southern contests (Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday, March 13) to even make it out of the next week as a viable candidate. But the writing on the wall seems clear to everybody outside the Gingrich campaign.

4) What next? -- The most important question over the next two weeks by far is whether Gingrich departs the race in time for Santorum to reap the electoral benefits. Will Santorum be the only remaining "Anybody But Romney" in time to stop Romney from piling up enough delegates to win the nomination outright? Santorum may be able to force Gingrich from the race by beating him in either Alabama or Mississippi, and might possibly consider putting a lot of resources into those two states to force a resolution.

Gingrich's fading chance at the nomination disappeared when a substantial comeback failed to materialize in yesterday's voting.  Going forward, all he will accomplish by staying in the race is to make it more likely that Romney wins the nomination.  Ultimately, this is going to come down to Newt Gingrich and what he really wants to accomplish, as well as whether billionaire Sheldon Adelson will continue to bankroll Gingrich's SuperPAC.

The calendar over the next few weeks is not particularly favorable for Mitt Romney, so there is still time for the "Anybody But Romney" vote to coalesce around Santorum if he's the only option left. Here's the calendar for the rest of March:

Saturday, March 10 -- Guam (9 delegates), Kansas (40), Northern Marianas Islands (9), Virgin Islands (9).
Tuesday, March 13 -- Alabama (50 delegates), American Samoa (9), Hawaii (20), Mississippi (40).
Saturday, March 17 -- Missouri (52 delegates).
Sunday, March 18 -- Puerto Rico (23 delegates).
Tuesday, March 20 -- Illinois (69 delegates).
Saturday, March 24 -- Louisiana (46 delegates).

I haven't looked up delegate allocation rules for those states -- I do have a life, you know -- but a first glance at the next two weeks looks as if we could see Gingrich win Alabama and Mississippi (90 total delegates), Santorum winning Kansas and Missouri (92 total delegates), and quite possibly Romney sweeping the assorted island contests (79 total delegates), which would leave us almost exactly where we already are as the contest heads into Illinois. That's the point at which it will really begin to matter if Gingrich is still in the race.  With Gingrich still in the race we probably see another narrow Romney victory in Illinois. But if Gingrich is out of the race by then, I suspect the race may shift towards Santorum.

Let's pretend for a moment that the outcome in Illinois is likely to be an average of the results in two similar Midwestern states, Michigan and Ohio, and that Gingrich stays in the race.  We would see a finish something like this with Romney once again edging out Santorum:

Romney, 39.5%
Santorum, 37.5%
Paul, 10.4%
Gingrich, 10.6%
Other, 2.0%

If Gingrich drops out of the race we might reasonably expect 1/3 of his supporters to go to Romney and 2/3 of his supporters to go to Santorum, the other "Anybody But Romney" candidate. That would give us a finish like this, with Santorum with a slender margin:

Romney, 43.0%
Santorum, 44.5%
Paul, 10.4%
Other, 2.0%

As the contest moves forward and we encounter more winner-take-all states, the dispersal of the former Gingrich vote could become incredibly important.

So far Mitt Romney has run well enough to earn a plurality of votes in most of the states, but not a majority of the votes. That does, however, translate into a slim majority of the delegate count. But Romney continues to have difficulty crossing the 50% threshold.  On Super Tuesday he only managed more than 50% in his home state of Massachusetts, heavily Mormon Idaho, and in Virginia where neither Santorum nor Gingrich was on the ballot. (The Wyoming caucuses are an ongoing process with multiple ballots designed to force somebody eventually over 50%.)

If Gingrich drops out of the race soon enough to give Santorum a clear shot as the non-Romney, we could see a very close race until the end. If he stays in the race more than another couple of weeks, the building math and the resources of the Romney organization should allow Romney to grind out a first-ballot victory at the convention.

In politics, a victory is a victory ... whether by unanimous acclamation or by a single delegate. But a long, bruising, expensive nomination contest featuring the social conservatism of Rick Santorum and the one percentism of Mitt Romney doesn't seem likely to bode well for the GOP's chances of recapturing moderate voters in November.

P.S. As for Ron Paul? Well, he seems likely to keep on truckin' to the convention, and gives no indication that he's likely to bolt the party. He does not, however, look likely at this point to pile up enough delegates to have a substantial impact on the convention. So far he has piled up just 47 delegates, 6.7% of the total.  Republican Libertarians might be looking for a new standard bearer in 2016.