Stop McCain strategies are a long shot

Laura Meckler and Elizabeth Holmes:

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Messrs. Huckabee and Romney, who seem to hold one another in great disdain, suddenly have a common cause of sorts. Mr. Huckabee has called Mr. Romney a flip-flopper and a phony; Mr. Romney has said Mr. Huckabee is a tax-and-spend liberal. Yet both want the nomination battle to continue in hopes that some change in fortunes will swing it their way.

Republican rules on awarding delegates offer some hope to Messrs. Huckabee and Romney. Many contests are winner-take-all, giving someone who is behind a chance to catch up in the delegate race with a few big wins. The first big opportunity comes on Tuesday, when Maryland and the District of Columbia join Virginia to complete the Beltway trio of voting. These winner-take-all contests have a total of 119 delegates at stake. One week later, Wisconsin's 40 delegates will go to the winner of its primary.

Bigger prizes await on March 4, including in Ohio, where the winner will get all 88 delegates, and Texas, which doles out candidates in proportion to the vote.

"We're going to continue on until someone has 1,191," the number needed to win the nomination, said Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltsman.

Mr. Romney won more delegates and more states on Super Tuesday than Mr. Huckabee did, but because expectations were higher, Mr. Romney's performance was widely seen as disappointing....

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Some interested in stopping Mr. McCain see their best chance if both Messrs. Romney and Huckabee stay in the race and, between them, continue to take delegates away from the front-runner.

Richard Viguerie, chairman of American Target Advertising, a Republican direct-mail firm, has issued a call for an open convention where the party could unite around someone else. The only way that will happen, he says, is if the race is muddled and no one wins enough delegates. "Huckabee and Romney have to stay in the race," he said.

Mr. Viguerie rejects both men as insufficiently conservative, but he is more concerned about Mr. McCain, angered by his stances on global warming, taxes, campaign-finance reform, stem-cell research and immigration. "The Republican Party is shattered out there, in tatters. I don't see how McCain can put Humpty Dumpty back together again," he said.

But Messrs. Huckabee and Romney might stay in the fight out of their own sense of possibility. "If they stay in the race and it's deadlocked, hope springs eternal that the convention could turn to them," he said. "Once you're out of the race, you're out. But if you stay in, you have a chance to put something together."

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We are close to reaching the point where neither can win, but they can deny McCain to votes needed for a first ballot victory if they can change the momentum. That in itself is a remote possibility. Even if its happens, the probably outcome will be a McCain Huckabee deal that will not get much love from conservatives.

It is worth pointing out that the lack of enthusiasm in the Republican race is tied to the lack of a candidate who excites the conservative base. Whoever gets the nomination will have to hope that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama do that for them.