Florida was the win McCain needed -- and with it all of the 57 delegates awarded in the winner-take-all contest. But it was not the win McCain wanted.

The senator Florida won on the basis of the strong support he received from the state's large blocs of moderate and liberal Republican primary voters. Unfortunately for McCain, liberals are definitely not the essential players in the Republican nominating process. Moderates are not the heart-and-soul players in the Republican Party. Conservatives are. And McCain is still struggling to win their loyalty. Indeed, even now, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett says, "The anger and bitterness toward John McCain is extraordinary among conservatives."

What is certainly true is that the Kremlin is no longer a global adversary: its relations with the Muslim world and China, are tetchy and ambiguous. But the lack of a global dimension doesn’t make the tussle for power less troubling in the main theatre of the old cold war—the countries stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Clearly the icy and terrifying confrontation of the 1950s and 1960s is not in view. But that era shaded into détente—what some have called the “soft cold war”. Finding similarities between that era of uneasy coexistence and our own is perhaps easier. But whatever the new era is called, the big question is what to do about it.

There's a reason the Detroit Auto Show is now known as the North American International Auto Show: The U.S. auto industry is already a composite of U.S.- and foreign-owned companies. The Level Field Institute, an organization formed by retired GM, Ford, and Chrysler employees to encourage U.S. citizens to "buy American," reports that roughly 30 percent of U.S. autoworkers now work for foreign companies.

How to protect these roughly 83,000 U.S. jobs and rescue a drowning industry at the same time? By standing athwart the tide of globalization and yelling "stop"? Somehow, I don't think that's going to work.

Some environmentalists are decidedly skeptical of the concept, seeing the industry as akin to the medieval church practice of selling indulgences to sinners--noblemen who ate meat on Friday or did something bad to a servant girl could, with the proper donation, have their spiritual records expunged. The eco-fantasy of offsets allows people the illusion of having it both ways: Burn lots of jet fuel but avoid doing harm.

Whatever their intentions, these companies operate in an accountability vacuum. While the Kyoto Protocol established widely accepted guidelines for countries looking to offset their greenhouse gas emissions, at the consumer level there's little agreement about anything--no universal standards for estimating a person's carbon footprint, no agreement on the technologies that are most helpful in reducing global warming and no regulatory body to oversee the industry.

The media has latched onto the eggs-in-one-basket storyline, keeping Rudy's candidacy alive, despite it being totally disconnected from the facts -- as they do when assigning grand narrative arcs to candidates that bear no relation to the simple fact of how many delegates have been compiled. Reporters insist on this narrative even despite being told by Rudy himself, as our sponsors note, that he hadn't skipped New Hampshire and spent more time there than he had in Florida.