Jeff Smith: Is Mitt Romney the Republican Nominee?

It does bring him closer to the nomination, due in no small part to his uncanny good fortune. Let’s review.

The woman who rose meteorically to take the Iowa straw poll collapsed upon the entrance of a governor who offered the veneer of tea party rhetoric as strident as hers, but had the backing of mega-donors from the state with more Republican money than any other outside California.

That governor, who was thought to be his leading conservative opponent, turned out to have spent about as much time preparing for the campaign as my students spend preparing for pop quizzes.

When the governor’s lack of preparation became obvious, he was replaced briefly as the national frontrunner by a former pizza executive who made the governor look like Thomas Jefferson.

When the pizza exec showed himself to be completely unfamiliar with some of the most basic facts of foreign policy, and an impressively lecherous fellow to boot, a new frontrunner emerged, one whose national favorable ratings were lower than Nixon’s during impeachment. This man had a record of personal behavior that John Edwards might have been ashamed of combined with an unmatched proclivity to self-destruct, and he proceeded to do so in short order.

The former senator who rose in Iowa at the last moment to replace him as frontrunner had raised less than $1M at the time of his ascent, and lacked any semblance of national campaign infrastructure.

But to Romney’s great good fortune, the man less popular than an impeached Nixon regained enough momentum in the ensuing weeks to ensure that the previous man could not build on his Iowa victory – a victory which was, to Romney’s even greater good fortune, not made official until weeks later, dramatically reducing its impact.

I challenge even the most imaginative journalist or satirist in the nation to conjure another scenario by which the anti-Romney majority could have been so improbably failed to unite.

(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from Politico’s Arena)