We know it's just a story, but still...

The basic story for the Republican primaries seems to have agreed upon by nearly every commercial news source: Mitt Romney remains the front runner but only by a slim margin, as he fails to deliver the major victory that would "seal the deal." On Super Tuesday we heard that Romney's razor-thin victory in Ohio kept his rivals at bay but left him still vulnerable. There are horse race analogies ("by a nose") and boxing analogies ("no knock-out") and every other narrative device that presents the primaries as a series of close-fought battles, any one of which might prove to be a turning point, for a prize that might still be snatched from the favorite's grasp.

     That makes for good drama, but the reality is this: the winner will be the guy with the most delegates, and there Romney is so far ahead as to be nearly unassailable. Super Tuesday was an overwhelming victory for him as he picked up 213 delegates to Santorum's 84, leaving him with a total (according to the AP) of 422 to his nearest rival's 181. That's well over half of the 761 delegates allocated so far, which means that if Romney keeps plugging along as he is—or not even as well as he is—he'll still easily capture the majority he needs to win the nomination. By Fox News's estimate, Romney can win by taking only 37% of remaining delegates, while Santorum needs 63%.

     One aspect of the standard story is that Romney still has to "make his case" to the party's leaders with more impressive showings. It's true that in a close race, the votes of those leaders—all uncommitted delegates—might tip the balance. But it's also true that the vast majority of them have already made clear that they see Romney as the only viable choice for the general election. There is no case for him to make. Unless the Romney campaign somehow collapses completely (which it won't), the race is already over. The front runner is uncatchable.

     But we don't want that story, because we're human. We like our drama and our suspense, and we like to experience long, tedious historical processes as a series of battles and crystalline moments. We want to think that one's man blunder or another's heroic overachievement might yet turn the tide that we've seen rising all along. Which, I suppose, is why, in The Undressing of America, I'm telling the story of our transition from a culture of concealment and censorship to a culture of exposure largely in the form of a battle between a pair of willful, truculent bigger-than-life men, Anthony Comstock and Bernarr Macfadden. The great economic, technological, social, and intellectual currents that carried us inevitably along that journey are well worth explicating, and they're the bedrock of the story. But what holds my attention (and will hold yours, I hope) is the small arena of combat through which those currents are turned into human drama.