Ed Kilgore can't believe Romney's good luck:
The long and short of it is that an essentially anti-Romney party (defined as its actual voting members, not elected officials, pundits or other elites) has failed either to unite behind or eliminate any of his rivals (with the exception of early casualty Tim Pawlenty).
Bachmann was never going to be the nominee, yet she served Romney by croaking TimPaw’s candidacy and then locking down enough Christian Right support in Iowa to divide its ranks. Cain spectacularly self-destructed. Gingrich built his surge on a combination of debate performance—a fuel that could sustain him only so long as debates were held regularly—and the public’s temporary amnesia about his personal and political history. Ron Paul soaked up oxygen and activists in Iowa, the one and only state where the lay of the land and the nominating contest rules gave him a chance. And Rick Perry has run an amazingly inept campaign that serves to remind us all that high-paid political wizards often don’t know their asses from page eight when the chips are down, and that state-level success is not always transferable to the big stage.
The Dish 