Visual source:
Newseum
Look at those headlines. The news is good for John McCain, maybe, but hardly triumphant for Romney. Opinion from the last few days:
NY Times:
With what appeared to be only a slim victory in Ohio, Mr. Romney must decide what is needed to repair his lethargic candidacy.
Maybe a personality transplant? No? How about a wholesale reprogramming? Hey, he could just stop lying about anything and everything.
Dan Balz:
Super Tuesday confirmed anew that Mitt Romney remains the favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination, but his slow, unsteady march is coming at a steep price. As he advances toward victory in the primaries, he is losing ground in the general election.
You can't get any more 'conventional wisdom' than this. Anyone who thinks this primary is helping Romney or the GOP needs to turn in their pundit credentials.
WaPo:
In suburban Cleveland, Matt Howells, 52, a contractor and Santorum voter, worried that the rivals have merely managed to harm Republican prospects in November with all that negativity. “They really have an uphill battle,” he said. “I really don’t see a Republican winning the White House. I see it going down as Obama again.”
Eugene Robinson:
How’s this for political cowardice? Right-wing bloviator Rush Limbaugh launches a vile attack, full of sexual insults and smarmy innuendo, against a young woman whose only offense was to speak her mind. Asked to comment, the leading Republican presidential candidates — who bray constantly about “courage” and “leadership” — run from the bully and hide.
“I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used,” said Mitt Romney. I wonder what language Romney thinks Limbaugh should have used to call Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
“He’s being absurd, but that’s, you know, an entertainer can be absurd,” said Rick Santorum. I doubt seriously that Fluke found it entertaining, in an absurdist kind of way, when Limbaugh creepily suggested she and other women post sex videos on the Internet. I hope and trust that Santorum wasn’t entertained, either.
Ana Marie Cox:
The very normalcy of Ohio, combined with some statistical superstition, is what makes it special. For those of you who will be watching tonight's returns with a drink in your hand and a desire to see double by the close of the polls, take a swig every time you hear that no Republican presidential candidate has won the office without winning Ohio. (Please have a designated driver.) That bit of trivia is meaningful, of course, only in so far as there are reasons why Ohio has been such a bellwether – and this is where its representativeness comes in.
Charlie Cook:
The bottom line is not whether Democrats will lose Senate seats and Republicans will gain them, but how many. Democrats have 23 seats up (read “at risk”) and the GOP has just 10. Democrats have to deal with seven open seats to just three for the GOP. Democrats have 11 seats in danger, and Republicans have just three. Can the GOP get the three seats it needs with a White House victory, or four seats with a loss? That is a closer call than it seemed a couple of months ago.
EJ Dionne:
What happens in Ohio politics never stays in Ohio, and there are two story lines here on the eve of Super Tuesday.
There is, first, the Republican presidential primary fight. Rick Santorum has to win Ohio to keep his candidacy alive. A Mitt Romney triumph would, at last, turn him into the “inevitable” Republican nominee. The second narrative involves the struggle for a state that Republicans must take in November to have any chance of defeating President Obama.
The problem for Republicans is that the two story lines are not coming together.
Ronald Brownstein:
In the NBC/WSJ survey, Obama held a 50 percent to 43 percent advantage over Romney nationally, up from a 47 percent to 44 percent lead in the average of the news organizations' polls during the second half of 2011, just before the voting began in the Republican race. What's especially striking about the new survey is that it shows Obama has made his biggest gains among the group that has consistently resisted him the most: white voters without a college education.
In the NBC/WSJ surveys through the second half of 2011, Romney led Obama among those working-class white voters by a commanding 52 percent to 38 percent, according to figures provided by Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the survey with Democrat Peter Hart. But in latest survey, Romney's advantage with those voters had shriveled to just five percentage points-48 percent to 43 percent. By comparison, in 2008 non-college white voters backed John McCain over Obama by a resounding 58 percent to 40 percent; Republicans won even more of them (63 percent) in the 2010 Congressional election.