Super-Duper Tuesday

Here’s what I’m trying to figure out about “Super-Duper Tuesday” — the ridiculously early multi-state primary-palooza on Feb. 5: How are the candidates going to manage their concession/victory speeches?

Here’s the Feb. 5 list (copied from TPM/Election Central): Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho (D), Illinois, Massachusetts, Minesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico (D), New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia (R). [Oops, and Arizona.]

So we could, in theory, be treated to the spectacle of, say, Mike Huckabee giving a speech from some hotel room in — I don’t know, let’s say St. Louis — celebrating his victories in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia while simultaneously conceding his defeats in Alaska, [Arizona], California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota and Utah. All while also trying to squeeze in all of his campaign talking points.

In Huck’s case, I think he should probably just get his band up there and set the speech to music using Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere Man”:

<blockquoteWe won in Little Rock and Tennessee
Cleaned their clocks in Montgom-ree
New York’s outcome wasn’t pretty
Congrats Mitt in Salt Lake City …

I doubt that approach would work for John McCain or Hillary Clinton though. Or for Obama, though he’ll probably manage to make even the list of states he’s conceding sound like the best commencement address you’ve ever heard.

(I suppose, since I’ve been complaining about the cable commentariat never mentioning John Edwards, that I should mention John Edwards here, but I can’t think of a good John Edwards joke. Maybe something about appealing to NASCAR voters by borrowing Matt Kenseth’s strategy of stringing together a bunch of third-place finishes? Too obscure?)

Seriously, though, how is this going to work? I suppose each candidate could come out early and give their own multi-state concession speech, then duck off stage and come back out later for their particular set of victory speeches, but that would seem to require an extremely sophisticated coordination between the various campaigns. (And how does that work? Are there inter-campaign liaisons assigned to handle that?)

Covering all of this will be a nightmare. Unless, of course, a clear front-runner emerges in each party, thus providing a simpler narrative for the talking heads on cable. That narrative may be so much simpler that we may end up hearing it whether or not it’s actually true. If, say, Clinton and McCain win both New York and California, that could end up drowning out everything else and the cable guys will end up crowning them the nominees whether or not the situation is actually more complicated than that. After all, complicated is hard. I really don’t trust Chris Matthews or Wolf Blitzer to sort all of this out for us. (I wouldn’t trust Chris Matthews or Wolf Blitzer to sort out the pieces for a game of checkers.)

We’re already sweating the front page of the paper in Delaware. What if the candidates who win there don’t win anywhere else? (Steve Forbes won a primary in Delaware.) What if they win everywhere else? What if … well, there are 39 41 races with more than a half-dozen candidates from two parties and tens of thousands of lines of Diebold code and I can’t even begin to calculate all the possible permutations of “what if?” for two weeks from Tuesday.

And as crazy as this is, with 21 22 states on Feb. 5, something tells me that in 2012 we’ll probably end up with 30 states on Jan. 24.

P.S.: None of the above examples should be construed in any way as attempts at prognostication. I have no idea.