I’m all in for Romney. I don’t want to say this video sealed the deal, but it helped. Obviously most people by that point wanted measurable progress in Iraq, and “timetables and benchmarks” were a way to measure that progress. The fact that war doesn’t typically work that way is beside the point. We’re forging a new type of war and people are feeling their way forward in it. McCain’s being an irascible, dishonest old ass and thinking we can’t draw our own conclusions about Romney’s words–or rather, trying to make sure we don’t. I’m not as firebreathing about illegal immigration as many of my blogging peers, and I am a lot more firebreathing about abortion than many of them, but McCain’s just a real jerk a lot of the time.

Romney ’08. Feel the love.

I’ve spent some time reading some of his position statements at Mitt’s website today and I’ll be reading more tonight and tomorrow.

And this is some savvy marketing: FredHeads for Mitt. Hey, Romney web guys & gals, I like the concept, and thanks for making a play for us poor downtrodden Thompson supporters, but some of us don’t have big ad banners, or spaces for them, on our blogs. Make me a little button similar in size to the one I already have for Fred, so that it fits neatly in my sidebar, and I’ll grab it if I decide to go for your guy. Thanks.

Update: Voting advice to benighted voters. From Xrlq. Heh.

My pain has been heard. Slublog’s friend Joe from Indiana (lotsa smart guys in Indiana) has a plan to break the states up into three groups and have a three-month settled primary. Doc Rampage was on the same track in the comments here.

The plan divides the states up into three groups selected numerically from a rank-ordering according to number of electoral votes. Thus each group of states has roughly 30 percent of the delegates. (Go read the details at the link–it’s actually not even that complicated.) I propose a rotational wrinkle: That instead of Slublog’s Group 1 going first in every primary, they should rotate each election cycle, starting with the presidential election and keeping their slot until the next presidential election.

It’s a sound plan. Doc Rampage was right that my toss-off “have them all at once” negates good campaigning, or rather, probably rewards poor campaigning. It’s tempting, in the age of mass media and the plurality of the kinds of media involved (print, radio, TV, internet), to write off personal campaigning as unnecessary, but voters deserve a chance to see up front how the would-be president interacts with real people on the ground. So the rotational-group plan focuses the candidates’ attention on groups of states, the same as now, but different states and more of them, so that more voters get a chance to put their first-choice stamp on the proceedings instead of taking leftovers.

The downside: It seems likely that more elections would end without a majority winner. But given that most of us have to give up our first choice and rally behind somebody we’re lukewarm at best about, that would just be putting into numbers the actual feeling of the voters. Isn’t that what elections are supposed to do?