The Monday before Super Tuesday

There’s a lot of clamor today in the media, across big network and cable tv, talk radio and the internet, over where things stand in the political campaigns right now and what might happen tomorrow. The Times sees it like this today: Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama are effectively tied in the opinion polls that haven’t had a good track record of predicting races so far. The Republicans are “more lopsided”, which is one of the only constants in this ever changing election year.

Now this is interesting:

For all his success nationwide, Mr. McCain is having a tougher time winning over voters in his home state of Arizona, The Los Angeles Times reports:

“In a straw poll vote two weeks ago of 721 Republican leaders in Maricopa County, the major population center of the state, a majority ranked McCain as the least acceptable Republican candidate for president.”

And Sen. McCain is campaigning in Gov. Romney’s home state of Massachusetts, heckling him in the last debate over Romney not being endorsed by the most conservative of his home state newspapers.

Republican senators, too, are on the fence about what their appropriate reaction to a McCain nomination should be…

Many Senate Republicans, even those who have jousted with McCain in the past, say their reassessment is underway. Sensing the increasing likelihood that he will be the nominee, G.O.P. senators who have publicly fought with him are emphasizing his war-hero background and playing down past confrontations.

In fact, one of the unappealing sides of Sen. McCain’s more public appearances lately has been his bristly smackdowns of anybody who dares to call his Senate record into question. Today has to hold the record for the most arguments on the air about McCain, from early morning tv news through mid-day talk radio and current editions of opinion and analysis pieces in print. There are so many renderings of this one candidate, it’s really difficult to discern what principles he actually holds and what policies he promises. When confronted by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday about a remark he made on appointing judges to the Supreme Court, McCain denied having said it or even holding that belief about interpretation of the Constitution.

Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO, a Romney backer, calls for more straight talk from McCain, a wholly reasonable expectation.

John McCain may well be the Republican nominee. That may be clear as early as this week. Conservatives who fought him on immigration last spring, who read Esquire, who listen to Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, who remember a John McCain open to running with John Kerry…are justified in being concerned about the “maverick” Arizona senator who stood proudly with pro-abortion politicians Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger last week in California at a time when he was being urged to reconcile with conservatives.

Another thing everyone is talking about today (Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh, Kathryn Jean Lopez…) is the three legs of the conservative Republican stool, and which one(s) voters will be willing to knock out to preserve the other(s).

Mitt Romney is fighting today and tomorrow for the three legs of the stool — keeping the Republican party conservative on foreign policy, economics, and social issues. I hope he succeeds. With close races in some Super Tuesday states and with what we’ve seen so far (few would have put their money on McCain being anything close to a front-runner a few months ago), it’s possible. But if he doesn’t succeed and steps aside, John McCain would be wise not to pretend to be the guy that Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney supporters have been dreaming would be their nominee. He’s not the man of conservatives’ dreams, nor does he want to be.

And about the only thing the media are saying about Gov. Mike Huckabee is that he’s staying in the race to take votes away from Mitt Romney. But Huckabee has growing grassroots support among social or moral conservatives, who have cranked up their machinery to get out the faith-based vote Tuesday for the one candidate who has never wavered from strong support of the sanctity of life and marriage. Though, the fiscal conservatives have problems with Huckabee…

Back on the Democratic side, the Kennedy family is divided between their party’s two lead candidates, and getting more so. I caught the impromtu appearance Sunday by Maria Shriver in California endorsing Sen. Barack Obama. She said if he were a state, he would be California. But she also said we are in a time when ‘we follow our own truths.’

Which, come to think of it, pretty well explains a lot of the clashes in the culture and politics right now.

And speaking of families, the Times blog mentions this:

With Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Obama locked in a tight race before Tuesday’s voting, there seems to be family feuding everywhere, with prominent and everyday Democrats alike finding themselves taking different sides than their spouses, siblings, parents or children. There is former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin (Clinton supporter) and his son James (Obama); Representative Charles B. Rangel (Clinton) and his wife, Alma (Obama); the Rev. Jesse Jackson (Obama), his wife, Jacqueline (Clinton), and their sons (split).

And by the way, though you’d never know it, Ron Paul and Alan Keyes are still in the race.