Super Tuesday Liveblogging Part IV

By Rick Morris

This will be my final post of the evening and I will be revising my previous assessment, at least on the Republican side. While I still think the race will go on for at least another few weeks, McCain comes out of tonight extending his already strong lead having just won California and Missouri. Also, at the time of my last post, I confess that I had not seen some of the internal numbers in the polling down South -- Romney, who was being propped up by so many right-wing "opinion leaders," ran in third place across wide swaths of Dixie. His enablers will cry anti-Mormon racism, I'll retort that those voters just know a slick Northern Yankee phony when they see one, but regardless, a candidate trying so hard to be Goldwater 2K8 cannot afford to be repudiated so soundly by such a significant part of the base. So my prediction in the last liveblog installment was wrong; McCain comes out of today much stronger, Romney is weaker and Huckabee is in better shape but still a distant third and almost completely a regional candidate. And the Mitt-Bot meme about McCain only winning states dominated by Northeastern fru-fru elites (I never understood how South Carolina and Florida fit into that narrative?) -- well, McCain wins Illinois and Missouri among other states. How do you like them apples, Chowds?

The Democratic picture is still quite muddled. Obama's going to come out of the night with more states won, but Hillary just won the Big Casino, California. That Clinton win proved a bit disquieting for Claire McCaskill ... at least from the looks of her creepy, wrinkled Oompa Loompa visage.

Late note from MSNBC: Team Mittens is having "frank discussions about the future" on Wednesday. Turn out the lights, Dandy Don, the party's over.