Crunching the GOP's Nomination Numbers

H. N. BURDETT

Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein's maxim certainly applies to the Byzantine thicket of primaries and caucuses that comprise the current Republican presidential nominating process.

At the end of the day, the actual number of states won by a candidate is inconsequential compared with the total of delegates within the state a candidate can manage to scoop up. In some states, the prize for winning the most votes is all of its delegates. In other states, delegates are divided in proportion to the votes garnered by the individual contenders. Some caucuses and primaries are closed to only Republicans; others are open, allowing for malicious mischief by Democrats and independents with absolutely no intention of voting for the GOP candidate in the November presidential election.

Four years ago in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, freshman Illinois Senator Barack Obama upset the far better known and financed Hillary Clinton. Ballistic over the fact that his wife's campaign had poured $29 million into Iowa for a mere 70,000 votes, Bill Clinton was convinced that the Obama campaign had rigged the outcome by importing supporters from Illinois. The Clinton strategy had depended on a low turnout. But 239,000 caucus voters participated, almost twice as many as four years earlier.

With 1,144 delegates required to secure the nomination and after 20 debates, Mitt Romney now leads the remaining field of four with a scant 105 delegates, followed by Rick Santorum (71), Newt Gingrich (29), and Ron Paul (18). Even should Romney sweep the table, winning all the delegates in both Michigan and Arizona on Tuesday, he would have a cumulative total of only 164. There is some conjecture that Romney could win the popular vote in Michigan and still be left with fewer delegates there than Santorum.

If front-runner Romney were able to win every single delegate up for grabs through March 6 Super Tuesday when 10 states hold primaries or caucuses - mathematically possible but astronomically improbable - he would still fall 502 delegates short of clinching the nomination.

Thus Super Tuesday is less likely to be the defining moment for the eventual GOP presidential candidate than two perhaps critical Tuesdays in April. Among the four states voting on April 3 is Texas, which alone has 155 delegates. On April 24, New York's 95 delegates and Pennsylvania's 72 will be determined along with those of three other states with a total of 64 delegates. And the labyrinthian minefield to the nomination could continue even through June 5, when California, with 172 delegates, and New Jersey, with 50, are among the five states voting.

Still, when asked about chances that the GOP nominee will be ultimately decided by powerbrokers at the party's August 27-30 national convention in Tampa, no less an authority than Karl Rove, the contemporary incarnation of Machiavelli, opined that this was as about as likely as discovering life on Pluto, the outermost planet of the solar system.

Meanwhile, Barack (No Drama) Obama's campaign builds its war chest, speculating on whom it will be used in November. The curtain remains tightly drawn on the GOP's final act in this theater of the absurd season. If money and organization retain their traditional significance, when it is lifted Romney will be standing atop the scrap heap into which the Republican party, with its irreparably collapsed center, has fallen.

Whenever the footlights illuminate the GOP nominee, today's odds remain where they were at the beginning: On former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to be the party's standard-bearer. As the farce has unfolded, each of the hopefuls - remember Cain, Bachmann, Huntsman and Perry? - have been tested and found to be untrustworthy or merely unworthy.

Should the script play out, the Republican party will strive to coalesce around Romney, a candidate more comfortable in corporate boardrooms than on campaign rostrums where he tends to spout nonsense about the height of trees and his preference for bankruptcy over bailouts, then in a less than grand finale croaks a few bars of "America The Beautiful." All crudely crafted smoke and mirrors to distract the party faithful from the former one-term Bay State governor's flipflops on virtually every Republican core issue. It is as though Romney has taken his cue from Groucho's memorable quip: "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."

More than a few Republicans will be reduced to daydreaming that the underdog they are stuck with will be strapped to the top of one of his wife's two Cadillacs and sped into the sunset. Only then would Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels or some other reluctant savior emerge from the GOP ashes, quixotically clutch the party's shredded banner, and march valiantly into the autumn of his discontent.

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