GOP Hijinks in Washington...No, the OTHER Washington

For some reason a lot of my friends are convinced that McCain is a dangerously strong Republican presidential candidate. None of these friends, I should add, are Republicans, and so for them I'd like to point out the following: after Super Tuesday, where McCain was all but assured the nomination, rather than rally around their candidate, Republicans showed up at the caucus to vote overwhelmingly against him, and nowhere is this clearer than in Washington state, where, as Josh Marshall notes, 74% of the caucusers voted against McCain--including 16% who voted for Romney, days after he dropped out of the race.

But it gets more interesting. This weekend should have been a significant blowout/comeback for Huckabee, because he swept in two out of three of the caucus states...but the third was Washington, and the GOP leadership there, when Huckabee and McCain were within less than 2% of each other, stopped announcing votes with only 87% of them counted, and then overnight unilaterally declared McCain the winner.

Luke Esser, who's in charge of the whole thing, explained his reasoning in a transparently half-assed rationale...then stopped taking any phone calls. Huckabee has gotten his lawyers involved. The whole thing promises to be quite entertaining...if it gets any traction in the mainstream news. I just listened to NPR and they said barely a peep about it, and there's nothing on my usual sources of mainstream online news. In the meantime, as these links above show, Talking Points Memo is all over it. This is just the sort of slightly-under-radar reporting that they follow up on really well. Watch it. If I were a Republican, I'd be really really pissed.