Elsewhere: Kansas and On; Jobs

Over at Post Partisan, I had some fun at the expense of Republican spinners, and talked a bit about the economy and the election. At Plum Line, I looked at the upcoming WH GOP 2012 events: Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Hawaii, and, always lots of fun, the territories. Although if I recall correctly we rarely get rapid results from those.

The tricky part in writing about all of this is talking about both tracks the nomination is on at the same time. On the one hand, there's the long slog and the delegate count. For that, everything matters, and it's possible for a small state to matter a lot more than a big one if the allocation rules differ -- Idaho was huge! On the other hand, there's also the very real possibility of a stampede starting for Romney which will make all of that sort of irrelevant. As I've said, I still think the latter is fairly likely. But the things that might create that stampede are only sort of thinly related to the delegate count -- for example, had Romney won Colorado it might have made a rapid end to the nomination fight more likely, but it would have had very little effect at all on the immediate delegate count. The problem is that if I want to get down into the delegate count discussion, which is interesting and possibly relevant, I don't want to do it without reminding everyone that these long slog calculations are still very hypothetical and there's every possibility that Rick Santorum will be long gone by, say, Texas in late May...but I don't want to bore everyone by constantly including that disclaimer.