Visual source: Newseum
Patrick Caldwell:
Meet Mitt Romney, your 2012 Republican nominee. From the get-go he was the field's front-runner, and the suspicion that he'll become the GOP nominee for president was only confirmed after last night's circus of a debate.
There's conventional wisdom, and then there's...
PPP:
EJ Dionne:
You knew it would come around to a moment for Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum, and Gingrich is the first guy up. I put it that way because conservative Republicans keep trying to elevate an alternative to Romney, but the alternative keeps crashing. And here’s an outside-the-box observation: There’s room for a draft campaign for someone not running now.
Gail Collins:
I have to admit, this is one of the most interesting early presidential seasons ever. Remember four years ago when Hillary Clinton was the Democratic front-runner and then Barack Obama came in and got all the attention? Well, try to imagine what would have happened if, whenever there was a debate, Obama appeared to be drugged or drunk or under the spell of an evil sorcerer. And then when he faded away, instead of rallying around Clinton, the voters flocked toward the least-known person in the pack, former Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska. And then when Gravel told an auditorium full of students that they should try to avoid alcohol and stick to marijuana (which actually happened) the remaining alternatives would be Jerry Springer and Anthony Weiner. And the voters would race back and forth between them while Clinton just kept putting in solid debate performances and getting 23 percent in the polls.
Matt Bai:
What’s really missing from Mr. Perry’s campaign — the vacuum that was exposed in the debate — isn’t smoothness or intellect, but a sense that the man is clear on what the moment demands. It underlies the lingering sense that Mr. Perry is running chiefly because he saw an opening he could exploit, rather than having spent much time thinking about what ails the country and what to do about it.
John Allen Poulus:
Going further and compiling a full preference ranking of the candidates would, no doubt, be difficult and costly. Many voters don’t know all the candidates, others don’t rank them rationally, preferences don’t always hold, and so on.
Nevertheless, to the usual questions about voters’ top choices, pollsters should add questions about their second or third choices and about those candidates they’d refuse to vote for under any circumstances. Elephant and donkey races deserve at least as much analysis of possible outcomes as horse races get.
Alexandra Petrie:
It is a sad day for Herman Cain.
Every day, these days, is a sad day for Herman Cain, with the exception of the part of the day where he shuts the door and rolls in the large piles of cash he has amassed in the course of his World’s Most Expensive Book Tour.
But today the last great hope of the Cain campaign to be a real contender vanished.
The American Mustache Institute withdrew its ringing endorsement.