In terms of consequence, Bush v. Gore it ain't. This is a relatively small contest in a nomination campaign that appears to be over. But this is something you'd expect either from Soviet history or a farcical passage in a Faulkner novel. And let's not forget the context. Huckabee starts the day with a blowout win in Kansas. That evening he gets the largest number of votes in Louisiana. Then in the third contest he's neck and neck with John McCain and looks like he may win all three contests of the day -- a shut-out for the all-but-declared nominee. Then as it's going down to the wire, the head of the state party decides he's seen enough and calls it for McCain.

This one looks and quacks like a duck. So someone should give it a much closer look.

What a blowout. Usually, even among true believers, you expect a party to rally around its presumptive nominee. But Kansas Republicans weren't buying, and they weren't content just to show a pro forma lack of enthusiasm. They crushed McCain like a bug, voting for Huckabee 60%-24%. Hell, "other" almost beat McCain.

There's no point in making too much of this. McCain is going to win the nomination and the party faithful will support him. But it's going to be a fight for McCain to win their love, and that fight might well keep him from broadening his appeal to the middle. Come November, liberals might not be the only ones asking What's the Matter With Kansas?

While Obama has clearly caught up to, and perhaps passed, Clinton in the battle for the nomination, they continue to have complementary strengths and weaknesses. To win in November, Obama is going to have do much much better among the white working class--one can assume that he would get Clinton's female voters just as she would get his African American voters. Clinton, on other hand, looks very shaky among white men. There remains a question, too, whether the young voters and independents who have flocked to Obama's banner would vote for her in the fall.

If John McCain secures the Republican presidential nomination, his victory would signal a revolution in American politics—a divorce, after a 28-year marriage, between the Republican and conservative establishments.

McCain would be the first Republican nominee since Gerald Ford in 1976 to win despite opposition from organized conservatism, and also the first whose base in Republican primaries rested on the party’s center and its dwindling left. McCain is winning despite conservatives, not because of them.

It should be easy for conservatives to get over their McCain issues since overall he was always the most conservative of the major candidates, but of course if these pundits were rational they would already see that.

And if Democrats give the GOP the gift of Clinton, which still seems very likely, these pundits can pretty much ignore McCain and focus entirely on Hillary Clinton's purported Trotskyism, murder and drug running operations, "shrillness," her husband's penis, etc.