Should Barack Obama win reelection this fall, the 2012 Republican campaign might be remembered as much for those who decided to remain on the sidelines and leave a feeble frontrunner unchallenged as for the party's actual nominee. Even though Mitt Romney has held onto his place as the only candidate who can realistically win the nomination, it has become increasingly evident that the former Massachusetts governor was a weaker candidate than anyone initially envisioned. The fact that Rick Santorum—a candidate dismissed as a bottom feeder by his opponents, the media and Republican voters alike as little as three months ago—has caused Romney this much trouble provides all the proof needed that, should Romney have faced a strong field of opponents, he wouldn't seem so inevitable.

I've been holding off on writing something about the bizarre spectacle of the Derrick Bell "exposé" that has consumed the nuttier corners of the right in the last couple of days, simply because it's so weird and pathetic that I wasn't sure exactly how to talk about it beyond simple ridicule. In case you missed it, here's the story, briefly: Just before he died, conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart said his web enterprises would soon release an explosive video that would transform the 2012 election by revealing Barack Obama's radical ties. The video turned out to be of something that was not only utterly unremarkable, but had been reported before. In 1991, when Obama was a student at Harvard Law School, the school was embroiled in a controversy over the under-representation of minorities on the faculty. Derrick Bell, the first black tenured professor at the school and a widely admired figure in legal circles, announced that he would take a leave until the school made efforts to hire more minority faculty. Obama spoke at a rally in support of Bell, and in support of more minorities on the faculty. And that's the shocking revelation. Oh, and one more thing that conservatives are up in arms about—they hugged. Really...

Nothing quite so aptly conveys the charade of practiced authenticity in our national politics as the four-star hotel room on a long-slog campaign run—a mess of tasseled drapes, ample sofas, and crisp white sheets all straining in hollow imitation of home.

The more things change in the Republican race, the more they stay the same. Punditry had it that Tuesday’s primaries and caucuses would be conclusive, because punditry yearns for the conclusive when it can’t have the purely chaotic. “The beginning of the end,” was the result that commentators anticipated, by which they meant the final collapse of the final anti-Romney incarnation—as precipitated by Rick Santorum’s stall in Michigan last week—and Romney’s consolidation of the nomination. Forty-eight hours later, nothing is different at all. Romney is still the front-runner and the only candidate whose ultimate victory is fathomable, even as more and more he appears the weakest nominee of either party since the 1980s. 

Let's face it: never in our lifetimes will we see as disastrous/awesome a vice-presidential choice as John McCain made four years ago when he plucked Sarah Palin from the wilds of Wasilla and set her before the nation. Whoever Mitt Romney chooses to be his running mate, he (yeah, it's going to be a he) is not going to be anywhere near as interesting, maddening, or costly to the GOP ticket. Unlike McCain, Romney is not a gambler. We can be fairly sure that his choice will be vetted a lot more closely, and the ultimate pick will be, above all, safe.

This is bad news for people like me who write about politics for a living. I'd go back and see how many words I've spilled over Sarah Palin in the last four years, but I'm afraid of what I'd find. I'm fairly certain I won't be anywhere near as inspired by the person Romney chooses. Will it be repellent white guy Rick Santorum? No! Will it be boring white guy Rob Portman? Maybe! Will it be some other boring white guy? Probably! And if Romney's inclination wasn't already to stick with someone safe and unremarkable, the Palin experience will make him even more likely to choose a running mate guaranteed to be as uninteresting as possible. So why not start the speculation now?

And speaking of Sarah Palin, the other day she was interviewed on CNN, and not only did she not rule out a run in 2016, when she was asked whether she'd be open to being drafted for the top slot by a desperate party at the convention this summer, she said, "I wouldn't close that door." It's not too late, Republicans.

Super Tuesday, with its mix of primaries and caucuses, has led to some interesting discussions about the merits (or lack thereof) of the latter. Rick Hasen argues that Congress should ban caucuses outright. Jonathan Bernstein has a response defending caucuses. Is Bernstein's defense of caucuses—which he concedes are on some level exclusionary and unfair—convincing?

Frontloading HQ’s Josh Putnam crunches the numbers and finds that under the most optimistic scenario, Rick Santorum is limited to a delegate haul of 1,075, which falls somewhat short of the 1,144 needed to win the nomination.

Putnam notes that you could goose that even further and assume big wins for Santorum in the remaining primaries. Even still, the most he could win is 1,152 delegates. By contrast, Mitt Romney’s minimum 1,162 delegates while his maximum extends to 1,341 delegates.