Michigan primary follies

Suddenly, Michigan's presidential primary may actually turn out to mean something this year. If Mitt Romney loses, in the state where he was born and won easily in 2008, he could be finished.

Those behind-the-scenes strategists and money men who have been backing him in the belief that he has the best (if not only) chance to beat President Obama, may reluctantly conclude that the rank and file just aren't willing to buy their plastic Ken doll, and turn elsewhere.

That, as Curt Guyette ably explains elsewhere in this week's cover story, is a situation that could lead to anything from a dark horse candidate to a brokered convention. "I never believed this would happen," Bill Ballenger, publisher of Inside Michigan Politics, told me. 

Now a word of caution — it is far from certain that Romney is really on the ropes. Polls in a primary contest are all but worthless, especially those taken more than a few days before the voting.

Most people have jobs and lives and only pay sporadic attention to politics and elections anyway, especially primaries. The one thing that's relatively certain is that most registered voters won't vote.

Won't vote at all, that is. That means that those who do turn up to vote in February tend to be the strongly committed and often stridently ideological, along with a few party faithful and a dwindling number who think voting in any election is their duty.

Fanatics do vote in primaries, which is why Rick Santorum has been doing so well. This is a man who is not only against abortion, he is against contraception, mothers having careers, and has equated gay relationships with "man on dog" sex.

Santorum looks like a nice, charming, unthreatening youngish man, who promises to return us to the well-scrubbed world of the family TV shows of the 1950s, a world that never actually existed.

But he really is right-wing religious extremism in a sweater vest, and terribly frightening to those who look behind his soothing words. 

However, he doesn't have the money or the organization, nor do the professionals really think Santorum can be elected president. Ballenger thinks it possible, even likely, that things can be turned around for Romney in time to give him a victory and shove him toward Super Tuesday on March 6. 

But regardless of who wins, the good news is that the primary apparently won't be an irrelevant farce this year. Four years ago, Michigan politicians of both parties conspired to make our presidential process the laughingstock of the nation.

> Email Jack Lessenberry