News Digest, 2/8/08: A Mittmentous Decision

Yesterday was a surprising day. Whereas it was assumed that McCain had the nomination locked up, he became the presumptive nominee yesterday when Mitt Romney snuffed out his own campaign (and his dignity) on stage at CPAC.

The crowd wailed, the crowd protested, the crowd booed. Mitt Romney was viewed by many conservatives as the only chance to get a candidate who isn't John McCain. In Texas, a long-held bastion of conservatism that simply doesn't play around, John McCain is viewed at best with a healthy skepticism and usually with something closer to outright hostility.

Many seem to prefer Huckabee, but he's no roadmap to the White House. He is hanging in there for now, and his strategy has seemed to work out from time to time as he failed upwards a few times across the South. He is awfully chummy with McCain, though, and I think Patrick is right that his campaign is, these days, little more than an audition for VP. McCain has to be hammering him to drop out every day, but then again, McCain may want to see how he polls in a head-to-head against Huckabee in some of the upcoming states like Virginia and Texas.

I'm going to talk more about this later today, but I do want to point out, again, how insane Romney sounded during his withdrawal speech yesterday. I got a chance to watch the whole thing late last night, and the crazy didn't stop when he equated a Democratic presidency with Terror Earth Crisis in Infinite Americas. The man who excised corporate tax loopholes and enacted a push towards state health care in his state while Governor of Massachusetts stood on stage and espoused a screed which may have well been titled "Applying For The Job Of President At Some Later Point By Finishing My Transformation, Or How I Learned To Hate Liberals More Than You." Sure, his speech enraged me on a basic level, but I think it revealed something more telling about McCain. More on this later.

In covering national politics, we have occasion from time to time to follow congressional races in additional to all the presidential stuff. Patrick McLeod had been keeping an eye on IL-03 in a primary challenge to incumbent Dan Lipinski that had gotten some netroots attention. Lipinski prevailed in the primary, and the next heavily-trafficked race is MD-04, coming up on February 12.

From the Political Affairs desk, Grace Stevens spends some time with the Democratic candidate for Texas Senate in District 9, Melvin Willms, in Thursday's On The Record. And our feature article this week, an editorial on priorities and goals for Texas Democrats in relation to winning back the State House, is a work from former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes called We Need to Focus On Texas’ Problems, Not Politics.