Romney races on

Mitt Romney of Massachusetts won the New Hampshire primary and remains the odds-on favorite to win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

His victory speech Tuesday evening was carefully titrated to convey a clear if unstated message: Ignore these also-rans who have fallen aside — the two-man race starts today, and it’s between me and President Barack Obama.

That may be a bit premature. But the fact remains that if Mr. Romney prevails in South Carolina, his challengers will begin to bleed money and support.

In fact, the more interesting result of Tuesday’s primary voting may be the second-place finish of the unelectable Rep. Ron Paul. His relative success indicates the political power of the Christian right either has waned or was never quite what it was cracked up to be.

It simply is not true that some hypothetically large socially conservative Republican vote was split between Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. Instead, the autumn was spent trying to locate a true social conservative who could mount a serious challenge to the professionally managed Romney campaign by championing issues which, frankly, are of secondary importance on the national stage to foreign policy and the economy. Each applicant was tried on for a few weeks, in sequence. That effort has failed.

Mr. Romney remains, standing strong.

Oddly, the strongest remaining establishment Republican challenge to Mr. Romney appears to come from Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, providing an odd vehicle for a message that Mr. Romney has been philosophically or ethically inconsistent. Mr. Gingrich has even taken to criticizing Mr. Romney for having been, at one point, a capitalist businessman.

Oh, the humanity.

The challenge facing the Republicans is to find a candidate who can unseat President Obama — whose economic and energy policies have been counterproductive, to say the least — and is both determined and competent to manage the government in the manner most likely to preserve our individual rights and liberties, while otherwise standing aside and allowing the free market to thrive.

Yes, the process is flawed and messy. Even Winston Churchill was ambivalent about it. While he acknowledged “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter,” he was also forced to conclude that, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.”

And it appears after Tuesday that GOP voters have very nearly settled on their man.