Your humble Goliard has been moderately enthusiastic about John McCain this Presidential campaign season, despite strenuous disagreements with the Senator on several issues. Yet the results of the Florida primary were unsettling and disappointing all the same.

It is, after all, still less than a month since the Iowa caucuses, which marked the end of the phony war and the start of the real race. There has been enough politicking and enough results to narrow the field, enough to make Republicans comfortable with seriously thinking about nominating one of these men…but not nearly enough to make a final choice. So the prospect of Mr. Romney being doomed after another second-place finish, and that locking us into a McCain nomination—well, it’s bound to induce panic, even outside the core of dedicated McCain-haters.

It is now clear that the race was only ever about two men. Why? Consider the others.

• Mr. Huckabee’s ceiling was too low as an evangelical identity candidate, an uber-Bush compassionate conservative on domestic policy, and a foreign-policy naïf. Despite his impressive rise from nowhere, on next to no money, there was no way he could ever put together a majority—or even a solid top-two finish—outside a handful of tailor-made states, and without a crowded-enough race to split the opposition.


• Giuliani either never was a suitable national candidate, or catastrophically miscalculated with his Florida/big-state strategy. (Or both.)


• Mr. Thompson’s fizzling out was inevitable once he decided to stay off the customary presidential-candidate hamster wheel, and run like Calvin Coolidge instead. (Alas.)


• Rep. Paul was always a non-starter. Too strident, too wrong on foreign policy, too many ways in which he scared the horses. (Sorry, Paulist friends.)

Which leaves McCain vs. Romney. A straight-up contest between these two, including a full test-drive shakedown of each, is still badly needed. Can Super-Duper-Schmooper Tuesday still provide anything like that, after McCain’s winner-take-all victory in Florida?

One can only hope. It’s too soon to commit. Too soon for it to be over. And way too soon to have to start enduring what will be the longest pre-convention phony war between presumptive nominees, ever.