\n| The Republican race is coming into focus. Well, sort of. If John McCain can win the Florida primary on January 29, he’ll be the clear front-runner heading into Super Tuesday a week later.<\/p>\n But Florida is hardly a sure thing for McCain. Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney are contesting the state heartily. Plus, Florida is a closed primary, meaning Independents can’t participate — and McCain polls far worse in contests where only Republicans can vote.<\/p>\n If McCain loses in Florida, the Republicans may well be headed to a deadlocked race and convention. And history teaches us that the likeliest candidate to emerge in that scenario is someone like Warren G. Harding: the prototypical, less-than-stellar candidate to which conventions turn when the going gets rough.<\/p>\n This year’s Harding? Believe it or not (are you sitting down?), despite the fact that he’s withdrawn from the race, is Fred Thompson.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n That could be interesting, no? \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n Meanwhile, down at the ranch<\/strike> American Prospect<\/a>, Spencer Ackerman writes:<\/p>\n\n\n| Indeed, Petraeus can basically write his next round of orders. But wherever he goes, his next important campaign probably won’t be on any battlefield. It’ll be political. For the past year, the GOP has laid the groundwork to enlist Petraeus as its standard-bearer in the fairly likely event that the party loses in November to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. You read it here first. Plant your lawn signs now. Petraeus 2012: Surging to the White House.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n But maybe you actually read it here first, eh? \ud83d\ude44<\/p>\n If the Petraeus thing were to happen, Hillary could trot out her famous “willing suspension of disbelief” line. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Steven Stark has an interesting perspective over at RealClearPolitics : The Republican race is coming into focus. Well, sort of. If John McCain can win the Florida primary on January 29, he’ll be the clear front-runner heading into Super Tuesday a week later. But Florida is hardly a sure thing for McCain. Rudy Giuliani, Mike … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-suspension-of-disbelief"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prJUJ-8p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} | |