Mini-Mitt's massive Super Tuesday challenge

Romney just barely eked out a win in his home state of Michigan. The robotic Republican will have an even tougher time in Ohio

After Mini-Mitt's diminutive three-point Michigan "triumph," which was a little like a Roman general being hailed for a near defeat, how important is Ohio? To put it in Santorian terms, it could be apocalypse two; once more, as in Michigan, Mitt will have to avert the sun darkening and the sky falling on his presidential campaign. 

Despite the conventional consensus, Romney could still face a near-end of days. And the auguries weren't good as he arrived in the Buckeye State to what should have been the hosannas of excited supporters. Supporters he does have there, but they didn't seem very excited at his kickoff event, where 100 to 150 of them huddled together and offered desultory applause. This was one time where Mitt should have said, "You're fired" — to his advance team, already infamous in campaign history for setting his signature economic speech at the site of the 2006 Super Bowl, and thereby creating a mesmerizing tableau of tier upon tier of empty seats. 

This is the fallowest field of candidates in either party, ever.

But Romney, as evidence by his ad lib about his wife's two Cadillacs, can always be relied on to make his own mistakes. He's very good at it, and he can't very well fire himself. Standing in front of a machine that shapes steel sheets into fence posts, with his characteristically awkward half-laugh, he blurted the first memorable sound byte of his Ohio appeal: "I gotta press the button" that starts this up. "That will be my heavy lift in terms of manufacturing."

This stumbling frontrunner can't seem to help himself. He constantly reinforces the sense that he's not real — that he lives in a golden tower and has come out to visit the peasants. After Michigan, where he decisively lost voters who earn under $100,000 a year, he faces a blue-collar, auto-industry-dependent Ohio where they may already have figured him out. He's running 11 points behind Santorum in the University of Cincinnati survey, and seven points behind according to Quinnipiac.

Still he has no choice but to fight and win there. For Romney, the rest of the Super Tuesday landscape looks bleak.

He will capture a lode of delegates in Virginia, but the state is already his own private prisoner due to the political fix that kept Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich off the ballot. The pre-cooked results there will be written off; they can't redeem defeat elsewhere and convince the party and the country that he's locked up the nomination. (And spin-meisters bar the door if the entirely unexpected happens and Ron Paul gives Romney a real run for it there.) Nor can Mitt invoke expected victories in reliably blue states like Massachusetts and Vermont — where he's actually only seven points ahead. Winning there may only confirm the hard-right's suspicions about his true colors. 

This leaves Alaska — probably to Paul, the libertarian who reflects its frontier character, or to Santorum, the true believer who most resembles and who's been most kindly critiqued by Sarah Palin. There's North Dakota — a terra incognita where there are no recent polls — which will command little attention on Super Tuesday. But the Tea Party is strong there, and Romney is not their cup of tea. Mormon-heavy Idaho should be Mitt's; that's pretty much the equivalent of him carrying Utah, and won't translate into national momentum.