As Super Tuesday looms, with Republicans casting votes in 10 states, there exists the possibility of something sublime at long last: escape.
Maybe, just maybe, if Mitt Romney does well — by which I mean he wins or all but wins in Ohio and Tennessee, the two most important states to watch — we can get out of the political doldrums in which we have been trapped for months and months and months and . . . move on.
This would come as a relief to me, and countless others like me, because, frankly, I can’t take much more of it.
The GOP primary has become a real-life version of the nightmare scenario in Luis Bunuel’s surreal 1962 film “The Exterminating Angel.” A group of people meet for a dinner party in Mexico City, then finds they can’t leave the dining room — for days and weeks — and turn on each other, commit suicide, offer sacrifices to the gods, etc.
Conservatives have all become like those guests: getting no nourishment from the endless primary, learning nothing new, getting crabby and eating each other alive.
Punch-drunk candidates are lured or wander into talking about ideological idiocies that take them and the political discussion wildly off course. In a sense, it’s hard to blame them, for the schedule moves on but the topics under discussion do not and they’re trapped in that room and they’ve trapped us in there with them.
When you look at the big picture, everything is fundamentally the same as in October: Mitt Romney is the only candidate with consistent support, still the front-runner, still the only sure-footed debater. He’s still rich. He still championed a health-care mandate in Massachusetts.
Newt Gingrich is still Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul is still Ron Paul. Rick Perry is out of it but was even when he was in it. Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain are gone, replaced as the not-Romney by Rick Santorum, who has problems of his own.
No wonder the mood’s darkening, the fighting’s getting uglier, and most of the talk’s about the internecine process rather than the goal — defeating President Obama in November.
Bunuel offers no explanation for the paralysis that afflicts his characters. The explanation for the “Exterminating Angel” Republicans is partly ideological, that the party as a whole would want a more faithfully conservative nominee than it’s likely to get.
And it’s partly due to the law of unintended consequences. Legislation passed in 2002 to reform “campaign finance” so weakened the national parties that they lost control of the primary process and the power to impose a certain discipline and order on recalcitrant and trouble-making candidacies without a prayer of winning.
A Romney triumph Tuesday would put enormous pressure on Santorum and Gingrich to surrender to reality and leave the race.
Our chances for blissful escape from the Exterminating Angel are in the hands of Ohioans and Tennesseans. Let us out, dear Buckeyes. Liberate us, glorious Volunteers. Please.
TENNESSEE
Santorum: 32%
Romney: 23%
YouGov poll, Thursday
MASSACHUSETTS
Romney: 56%
Santorum: 16%
YouGov poll, Thursday
OKLAHOMA
Santorum: 28%
Romney: 25%
YouGov poll, Thursday
GEORGIA
Gingrich: 38%
Romney: 26%
Rasmussen poll, Friday
IDAHO
Santorum: 29%
Paul: 28%
KLEW-TV poll, Jan. 5
VIRGINIA
Romney: 56%
Paul: 21%
Roanoke College poll, Thursday
ALASKA & NORTH DAKOTA
No poll results available
OHIO
Santorum: 35%
Romney: 31%
Quinnipiac poll, Friday