THIS IS THEIR FINAL FIT, THEIR FINAL BELLYACHE

Well, this, from The New York Times, seems like exactly the wrong conclusion:

Mitt Romney's quest to swiftly lock down the Republican presidential nomination with a commanding finish in the Iowa caucuses was undercut on Tuesday night by the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum, who fought him to a draw on a shoestring budget by winning over conservatives who remain skeptical of Mr. Romney.

Romney's quest for a quick win was undercut? The hell it was. The only outcome within the realm of possibility that truly could have thrown Romney off stride was a finish in third place, several points behind both Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. That didn't happen. And Paul, the stronger and better organized of the two remaining anti-Romneys, didn't even participate in the photo finish (he was three points behind the leaders).

What that means about Ron Paul is that even though he can do well (at least in states where independents and/or Democrats can vote in the GOP contests), he can't come truly close to winning even in a small state where he's got his full machine deployed. I really wasn't sure if that was true -- going into last night, as he appeared to be slipping in the polls, I thought he'd overperform. I thought he was the zeitgeist candidate. I thought the polls might be underestimating the size of his cult. But he couldn't pull it off. So he's certainly not going to pull it off in New Hampshire or Nevada, and I don't believe he has the juice to compete in a big state.

And Santorum? I've watched dour, earnest, underfunded purists try to challenge a grinning front-runner who has a slick, machine-like operation -- in '92, Bill Clinton had to deal with two such candidates, Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown. Not only do the challengers run out of money, they stop motivating their followers, in part because their campaigns offer no fun. It's all eat-your-vegetables.

Things could have gone very differently if the oh-Lord-does-it-have-to-be-Romney? vote hadn't been split so many ways last night -- although the guy who could have consolidated that vote and moved on to other states with money and energy was Rick Perry, and he decided to call Social Security a Ponzi scheme before getting into a race that's often decided in Florida, so why am I even talking about him?

And things would be different if we weren't about to take Romney's inevitable blowout victory in New Hampshire so seriously -- for the love of God, people, Paul Tsongas won there in '92. Winning this damn thing as a Massachusetts resident simply shouldn't count.

Paul is going to fade -- he can't do well where doing well requires big media buys rather than shoe leather, and he can't win anywhere they want to kill a lot of brown people for Jesus. And Santorum can't do well except in states that match the latter description -- he's about to become, to Romney, what Hillary Clinton was to Barack Obama in '08 after Obama had the race wrapped up: the candidate who picks up the socially conservative rural voters and loses everyone else, except he'll be a flat-broke version of Hillary.

And no, don't even mention Jon Huntsman -- sure, maybe he'll (barely) crack double digits in New Hampshire, but he still does self-sabotaging things like this, as if the point of his campaign is that he's shorting himself on Intrade:

Are you crazy, Jon? No compromise with Obamacare! You call yourself a Republican?

So the coronation is coming. The only question is whether Romney will be able to hold the base in November. I think any libertarian or Guns-n-Jesus minor-party candidate out there will have a chance of hurting him, though the GOP Establishment Noise Machine may well crush those candidates just the way Gingrich and Cain were crushed. So I think we may have our race, and quite possibly it will be a simple two-man race.

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Oh, and please, don't anticipate that Gingrich will use his remaining time in the race to destroy Romney. Sure, he'll try, but he won't succeed -- he's now seen by the base as the weak horse, so whatever he says is a joke. And please don't think (as a lot of people seem to think, to judge from Twitter last night) that Romney will now be harmed by a lot of opposing candidates demanding that he release his tax returns -- some may ask, but his refusal to do so is probably very appealing to the base, which hates campaign reform laws and any questioning of wealth.