The Real Race Begins

At last. The silly season is over. No more historic make or break contests over 12, 17 or 34 delegates in a Republican contest which takes 1034 to win. More than that many will be decided between the coming Tuesday and the next one. Will we know after that?

Not necessarily. Here's what we know now.

George Bush (drop the W - everybody knows who we're talking about) emerges from the silly season with a two to one edge in delegates he can take to the bank (roughly 200 to 100).

There are 525 more delegates to be chosen in the ten remaining Southern primaries. Virginia surely put an end to the McCain campaign's curious notion that a ranting Yankee scold can trounce a smiling Southern good old boy in Dixie (down there that "smirk" turns heads at singles bars) and that a shrewd way to do it is to denounce the Christian Coalition as a Satanic cult. Allowing for a Charleston here and there, give Bush 500.

And put California aside for the moment.

Now, for the sake of argument, give McCain every conceivable break next Tuesday and award him just about all the delegates from the remaining eleven contests. That includes New York. It comes to 400.

Score so far: Bush 700, McCain 500.

If Bush wins California, he has 862. This means, that to keep Bush from topping out, McCain would have to get more than 600 of the 800 delegates not already in the count. VERY tough.

Move California to the other side, and McCain still has his work cut out for him, but it's arguably doable. California, however, is the rare major state outside the South among whose Republicans the religious right is a formidable force. That is why one major player in the McCain camp, who was not aboard the plane when the decision on Virginia Beach was made, went ballistic when he learned of it. That speech, which led every network news broadcast and most newspapers, may possibly have guaranteed McCain will win one California primary. It could also have doomed him in the other.

This brings us down to the finer points of the "blanket primary." If you think you've finally got this down cold, think again. Yes, there's a beauty contest mandated by California voters in which voters of either party or no party can vote for a Bush or a McCain slate of Republican convention delegates. Yes, the California legislature, under pressure from both national parties, authorized separate tallies of the vote by registered party members. And those tallies will decide who gets the convention delegates -- even if someone else wins the beauty contest Californians voted for. Right?

Well, maybe. Like all the candidates on the Republican ballot, McCain signed an affidavit saying he would not in such a case mount a challenge at the Republican convention. He had to sign it in order to qualify his slate in the first place. It also indicates the justified concern of the California party brass (by coincidence, perhaps, almost solidly for Bush today) that such challenge might have merit.

Does that settle the matter? Of course not. The McCain campaign may have pledged not to mount a convention challenge, but its California delegates didn't. Nor did its affidavit say anything that would foreclose a challenge in the courts. Lawyers can be found who will argue that the legislature had no authority to amend the primary enacted by the people. As for the national party rule (32b9) which counting the votes of Republicans only was supposed to address, it doesn't. The rule says you can't pick delegates on a ballot that allows you to vote in another party's primary for some other office. And on Tuesday, a California Republican can still vote for Bush or McCain's delegates and at the same time for Diane Feinstein in the Senate primary.

Trevor Potter, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who is general counsel of the McCain campaign, acknowledges that none of these ideas is new to him but insists that "we intend to win among Republicans," and the campaign has no plans for a challenge if they don't.

Sure.