The Democrat nomination process certainly looks like a deathmatch, however. Edwards dead already, the rest stillborn and although Clinton and Obama have some options post-2008, there’s not a pie that can be divided as it has been in the GOP primary. There can be only one. Or, at least, there should be — a joint ticket might look nice on paper, but would it be believable?

Paul’s victory lies partly within, and partly without the Republican party. It could be important (like Goldwater’s movement) or it could be nothing of great significance, but he’s certainly built a corps. Whether it can hold together and whether it can do that whilst expelling some of the undesirables is another matter; maybe it doesn’t even need to be an identifiable movement at all, so much as a current (that’s probably my favoured result, because it’ll go outside individuals and move the party and the middle as a whole, although I’d want rid of some of the elements of the Paul campaign too, such as the foreign policy idealism).

From McCain’s point of view, the battle was the first part of his war and the General Election is the second. He’s not leading a movement and he won’t run again, so there’s no long game (well, not on top of the long game he has already run). It seems to me that there’s not a “McCain won the battle, but did Huckabee and Paul win the war” issue here, so much as that they all got from the primaries the best they could have hoped for and that there was room for them all to have it. The people that did lose are possibly headed by Romney, who must surely be outshone by an actual conservative that the party throws up come 2012 and Giuliani, whose appeal diminishes the more time moves forward from 2001; those were two people that potentially had a lot at stake this year, like McCain and so in direct competition with him, and in that there would only be one winner.