Too-Much Tuesday: Notes From The Cheap Seats

Fill-Soak-Wash-Rinse-Spin-Spin-Spin-Spin-Spin-Spin. All night long me eyes were playing tricks on me, and even now in the semi-sober light of day it’s still going to take some sorting out. I spent the entire evening watching live and had to delete six hours of “The Closer” (with hot, hot Kyra Sedgwick!) to make room for 15 hours of TiVo’d Super Tuesday coverage.

For my live results and analysis I kept it on MSNBC all night. When I come home from work, I’ll fire up the DVR and see how last night’s B Team pundits fared. First I’ll see how badly poor old Wolf Blitzer kept up on CNN. (Wolf hasn’t aged well as a news personality. If you watch Tom Brokaw or Mike Wallace, you get that sense of gravitas and an elder statesman’s wisdom. With Wolf, you get memories of Gulf War I and Arthur Kent, and keep waiting for him to slip up and make a Paul Tsongas allusion).

Then, about 8:0o PM, I’ll switch to my recorded FOX coverage, and sit down for my FOX News drinking game where I slam one shot glass of Foster’s ESB every time the phrase “true conservative” is offered in the affirmative for Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, and two shots when it’s offered in the negative for John McCain. I will be passed out drunk by 8:12 PM.

STEALTH ‘BAMA: By the time I was in the door and saw the margin for Hillary over Obama in New Jersey and Massachusetts, I polished two beers and two cigarettes in rapid succession and was glad I didn’t wager more than $20 on Obama in California. But as the evening wore on, with the exception of Arkansas, his margins were much huger than Hillary’s and with every small state that fell into his column throughout the night, the delegate count got closer and closer until around 9:00 PM PST–even 30 minutes after California was called for Hillary with barely 15% of the precincts reporting–Chuck Todd from MSNBC projected an Obama delegate win for the evening. The latest AP count as of 4:30 AM Wednesday has Clinton winning 584 Tuesday compared to Obama’s 563. That leaves him within 80 delegates of Hillary heading into Washington, Louisiana, and Nebraska. There was much talk last night among the Obama people about a “war of attrition” with Hillary, given that they’re beating her in fund-raising by a 3-to-1 margin. Hmmmm. A “war of attrition” with a Clinton has about as much to recommend it as the old joke about a land war in Asia. This might be the Obama campaign’s second blunder in the last twelve hours. (His other blunder came during a speech to supporters, and his failure to load the seats behind him with more Hispanics and white females–two blocs that have shown him too little love so far. Forget the general election; he needs to start courting them more aggressively if he wants to have a prayer in Texas and Ohio).

MCCAIN’T BUY ME LOVE: All the predictions of the Republicans holding their nose and coalescing around John McCain come Wednesday morning proved to be pure folly. With Baptist minister Mike Huckabee the surprise story of Super Tuesday, the most right-wing elements of the Republican Party aren’t giving their love to McCain. Focus On The Family chairman James Dobson announced after Tuesday voting that he would neither endorse nor vote for Senator McCain. McCain is scheduled later this week to address a conservative group whose invitation he shunned last year. “He better not wear white”, one analyst said, suggesting the possibility that the Senator could be pelted with tomatoes as he takes the rostrum and attempts to make peace with the exclusively Christian crowd.

ROMNEBUST: Enough’s enough, Governor. Just go home.