Is This What an Arranged Marriage Feels Like?

I'll go out on a limb here: I don't think we're heading to a brokered convention.

On the old FrumForum site, my very conservative friend John Vecchione joked about the impending Romney nomination: "I feel like the bride in an arranged marriage I cannot escape." After Tuesday's votes, escape will become that much harder. The resistance remains. But it becomes more futile.

If Romney's party opponents could not stop him in Michigan, you have to wonder: where do they stop him? Perhaps he'll lose a state out of 10 on Super Tuesday. But with no money available for Santorum; few votes available to Gingrich; and no party elites available to Paul—it's hard to see how this Republican nomination does not rapidly converge upon the 2012 version of The Next Guy in Line.

The trouble is that the primary process has made, is making, and will continue to make The Next Guy in Line a weaker rather than a stronger candidate in the general contest come November.

Romney emerges from Michigan committed not only to the Ryan plan, but also to a 20% cut in tax rates, above and beyond his prior commitment to making the Bush tax cuts permanent. He emerges as the candidate who has endorsed the idea that President Obama is waging war on religion as never before seen in this country, not even when the prophet of Romney's faith was murdered and his own family driven into exile. He emerges above all as a candidate who has distanced himself from his own most signal achievement in government, his Massachusetts healthcare plan, and identified himself with America's financial elite in almost every regard.

That's not the race I'm sure Romney intended to run. But it will be hard to change now.