Chances are, Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee for President. A lot of things would have to go right for any of his opponents, but it's certainly not impossible.
Still, Romney is benefitting from having multiple opponents fighting for a share of the social conservative vote. He's better off having Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrinch in the race still (well, maybe not Gingrinch if the latter is going to go kamikaze on Romney), rather than facing only one of the three, because then, all the social conservative vote will go to that one remaining candidate.
Romney's situation kind of reminds me of the (incredibly well-filmed) scene in James Cameron's "The Abyss," where Ed Harris' and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's characters are trapped in a damaged submersible that's filling up with freezing water. Harris is wearing the only wetsuit. Without one, Mastrantonio can't make it back to the deep sea station. Harris offers to give her the suit, but she says it's too late, because she's already freezing.
Her solution is that he should let her drown. She points out that the water is so cold that it will keep her body preserved long enough for him to drag her corpse back to the sea station, where he can revive her(!). In other words, it's a war between the two kinds of death: by hypothermia and by drowning. There's a middle ground where she dies but can be revived later, because one form of death keeps the other from totally killing her off too quickly.
If Romney could dispatch all of his opponents at once, of course, that would be best for him. But until then, having them all keep one another at bay, even inadvertently, seems to be working best for him.
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