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A Few Notes On Mccain

-- According to the exit polls, McCain beat Romney by four points among voters who named the economy as their top concern. There are a couple different ways to interpret this--"the economy" is sufficiently generic that those could have been voters primarily concerned about pork-barrel spending or the like--but that seems like a potentially huge problem for Romney going forward.

-- The first thing McCain did during his victory speech was to emphasize that he won a closed, GOP-only primary, which a lot of people didn't think he'd be able to do. Some might note that it wasn't a one-on-one contest--Huckabee seems to have drawn a lot of votes away from Romney (making this the second straight primary in which McCain has benefited from a spoiler candidate). But when you consider that McCain's prevailed in the first closed primary and the one contested primary Romney won was an open primary, you start to wonder if this whole notion of Romney relying on party stalwarts and McCain relying on independents might not be a little overblown, at least once you get beyond opinion elites.

-- This will be the only time I engage in sartorial commentary on the blog, but McCain's choice of tie (thick sky-blue and yellow diagonal stripes) was...curious. Maybe he's been in Florida for too long.

--Josh Patashnik