Primary Season: When Will It End?

By Joel Achenbach
What if it's not over? What if it's not even close to over? This is turning into a scary night.

Way back when, Feb. 5, 2008, was the date circled on every political writer's calendar as the effective end of the primary season, at which point everyone could start reading novels again, and puttering around the house, and planning that Florida beach trip. But the story line developing tonight is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can decide whom they want as president.

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall writes, "McCain's folks were dying to have Huckabee stay in and do well. But I suspect at the end of the evening he'll have done a good deal better than ... McCain wanted. And Mitt's not getting shut out either. Keep watching this."

Michael Sherer at Time's Swampland blog writes that "as the early results come in from Super Tuesday's voting, the two-person narrative sure looks shaky in the South, the Republican Party's heartland."

Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has a headline on her blog asking, "What if Dems have frontrunner, not GOP?" And that Dem would be Obama.

Jim Geraghty at the National Review can't believe how poorly McCain is doing in Arizona. Of course he should have read, ahem, The Post's story the other day about Republicans and immigration in McCain's home state.