Feel the Mittmentum in Indiana!

I can't think of anything more clever or more funny than to just come out and say it:

19,480 people in the state of Indiana voted for Mitt Romney for president last night.

I can practically feel the Mittmentum some 900 miles away! That means if you put every Hoosier who cast a ballot for the former Massachusetts governor and put them on a bus and brought them to Philly's vast Wachovia Center for a hockey game, you would fill almost every seat.

That would be a massive throng, clamoring for a slick-backed candidate who left the GOP presidential race three months after his presence inspired about as much excitement as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman while he was still around, who now appears frequently on my TV to tell me how great is....

John McCain, who despite running virtually unopposed at this point for the GOP nomination, only managed to get 77 percent of the vote in Indiana, and just 74 percent of Republicans in North Carolina, where primary voters also have the option of voting "no preference."

Consider this: About four times as many Democrats went to polls in North Carolina as Republicans (and that's a solid red state!) and yet "no preference" almost got as many GOP votes (20,305, or 4 percent of the total)  as Democrats (22,722, just 1 percent).

Last month in Pennsylvania, I wrote about the ongoing support for long-ago-dropped-out fundamentalist favorite Mike Huckabee (who got a sizable 12 percent in North Carolina, and 10 percent in Indiana) and for unconventional, to say the least, anti-war still-a-candidate Ron Paul (8 percent in North Carolina, and also 8 percent in Indiana). Those numbers are not a total shock, because each one tapped into fairly rabid voting blocs. I don't think it bodes well for McCain, because both blocs may not even vote in November, especially Huckabee's evangelicals whose lack of enthusiasm in 2000 nearly torpedoed Geoge W. Bush.

But seriously, what to say about 5 percent of Indiana Republicans still voting for Romney, a candidate whose following was about as fanatical as supporters of the Los Angeles Clippers or the Florida Marlins. For all the punditry concern about division on the Democratic side -- and it is a legitimate issue -- I think the enthusiasm gap for John McCain is even more palpable.

Consider this: Indiana is a crossover state, and polling suggests that roughly one-in-10 of the 1.2 million voters in the Democratic primary was actually a Republican -- or 120,000 people. If that's correct, then in rough numbers a total of 530,000 Republican Hoosiers voted yesterday -- 320,000 who backed their party's candidate, John McCain, and 210,000 who voted for someone else. How many of those 210,000 will back McCain in six months?

Maybe McCain should have been the one doing the shots of Crown Royal.