Romney wins Illinois: Santorum and Gingrich need to stop.

According to CNN, Mitt Romney is on 562 delegates, compared to Rick Santorum on 249 and Newt Gingrich on 137.  There is only 1267 delegates left, and Santorum needs 895 delegates, 70% of the remaining delegates.  Gingrich is worse off.  He needs 79% of the remaining delegates, a massive 1007 delegates.  And we are about half way through this process.

No way can Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich turn this around.  Both Newt and Rick have indicated they are looking to hang around to the Convention.  But if neither of them have the most delegates, and Mitt Romney does, Romney will be chosen, not Santorum or Gingrich.

Both men need to suspend their campaigns now.

We suspect that Newt might quit the race if he loses Louisiana.  Rick Santorum on the other hand, doesn't seem to understand he's running out of time.  The math is heading up towards impossible, though Newt will get there first, and if neither man wants to be totally shunned by their Republican colleagues, they should both bail out of the race soon.

Of course, it seems that Newt has so much personal animosity to Mitt Romney, I wouldn't rule out Newt making an independent run.  Not that I expect him to do well in such a run.

UK Viewpoint on the DNC meeting.

I have written my first Daily Kos diary entry, with the same title as you see here.  You can read the full piece here, but here is the introduction to the diary entry.

For those of you who do not know me from the Viewpoint blog, where I talk about Life, The Universe and other strangeness, I am a UK citizen, an observer of events, looking for truth and sense in a world, both regular and political, that often seems senseless.  Hence my viewpoint being a UK one.

Now, to someone who participates in a one member one vote system like the UK's, I find the whole US system of primaries and caucuses before we even get to the election itself to be far too long, cumbersome and difficult to understand.  But out of all the campaigns I have followed since 1984, this one has gone on far longer than any other, like watching all six Star Wars films in one sitting, or all 3 extended cuts of Lord Of The Rings in one go, with more holes and caveats than a badly-plotted B-movie.

So this weekend's DNC meeting to decide the fate of the delegates of Florida and Michigan, is just another one of those holes that, towards the end of the film, has to be filled.  But at the moment, there seems to be no solution that would satsify all parties.  Nothing unusual there then!  The question though, that will be on the minds of the DNC Rules Committee will be, Is there a solution to this whole issue of Florida and Michigan's Democratic Party primaries, and if not, what can be done to avoid this whole debacle happening again?