Mitt wins a round

Mitt won the Michigan primary tonight, so he will be a viable candidate for the nomination for a while now. Of course, even if he gets it, his chances of winning the general election are pretty slim, as I wrote yesterday.

Every election cycle, some pundit claims this will finally be the year we'll see a brokered convention, and it never comes off. This time might really be it, especially because so many of the candidates with substantial support in the primaries so far are completely unacceptable to various factions of the party, who will make substantial efforts to stop Mitt, or Huck, or Rudy, or McCain.

In contrast to the conventional wisdom about getty the divisiveness out early and unifying around the nominee, I think it's good for the GOP to work this one out for a while longer still. As Republicans we don't know what we want the President to do, how should be know which guy we want to do it. The GOP has had a tendency toward complacency and anti-intellectualism in it for a while now. It has rarely served the party well, but most of them has been a minor irritation. Now things are different. Things are up for grabs at a more fundamental level than at any time since, say 1980. And, the party has associations with many unpopular things that need to be cleared away. There's no point in pretending that everything is just ducky when it's plainly not.