On just the Republican side of the ledger, there remains three horses in the race (assuming Rudy gets out today and throws his support to John) as we head to Super Tuesday. John McCain has emerged as the man to beat for the Republican nomination.
Only Mitt Romney stands in his way. And of course Mike Huckabee will compete as much as one can without money!
"We have a ways to go, but we are getting close," a gleeful McCain told supporters shortly after clinching Florida"s primary. A disappointed Romney promised to press on. The GOP nomination fight finally has boiled down to a two-man race (with a third limping along) after a year of volatility that made 2008 the most wide-open GOP nomination fight in half a century.
So after the Florida primary that"s always intriguing, the two main horses for the Republicans are:
1-McCain, the four-term Arizona senator and former Vietnam prisoner of war arguing that he alone has the experience, judgment and leadership to be a wartime commander in chief. He certainly is no conservative and if he gets the nomination, Rush Limbaugh feels the Republican party as it"s now known will be forever changed.
2-Romney, a former Massachusetts governor with two-decades of work in the private sector who claims he is best able to turn around an economy bearing down on a recession. He"ll now go primarily after teh conservative element and we"ll see just how many of them there are. Of course that "liimping horse" (Mike) could peel off some of those conservative votes- at least the evangelical crowd.
The Republicans don"t have any super delegates, so next Tuesday is major. In the race for delegates to the national party convention, McCain (93) leads, followed by Romney (59), Huckabee (40), Paul (4) and Giuliani (1). Next Tuesday: 21 GOP contests offering 1,023 of the 1,191 delegates needed to secure the nomination. It won"t necessarily be over next Tuesday, but we"ll certainly have a much better understanding of who will carry the Republican banner.