Four Takes on the GOP's Night

With the big day behind us, four writers look to where Super Tuesday results leave the GOP:

• John McCain “had an impressive night,” says Jim Hood in National Review, but still lost in many states among Republicans—and had terrible conservatives stats. He’s no good for November unless he can “motivate disgruntled and distrustful Republican activists.”

• Hood’s colleague Mark Steyn saw “an explicit anti-Romney vote in the South.” Mike Huckabee voters are the same people who mock the “pansy northern states” and they’ll never elect a Mormon. Mitt Romney's pitch that he’s the most acceptable to conservatives hit the skids in the Bible Belt.
• The “biggest news” is Huck’s Southern dominance, says Andrew Sullivan: The “pastor cannot be denied,” and now that he and McCain are in front, it’s clear the GOP’s conservative leaders “are very scantily clad emperors.”
• The New Republic’s Bradford Plumer notes that Karl Rove shot down a Mac-Huck ticket last night, calling the pairing “double trouble”—as Huckabee has his own vocal antis in the party. Plumer’s inclined to trust Rove, who “presumably has a sense for where the base's erogenous zones are.”

(More John McCain stories.)