My own Washington state was the hugest prize in the Saturday derby, with 80 of the day’s 161 up for grabs (the state has 97 delegates, but only 80 are chosen by the caucuses, and the rest are the dreaded and suspect superdelegates). Obama cleaned Hillary’s house with a dominating 68-31 percent clobbering. A lot of pundit eyes were on Washington, with a female governor and two female Democratic U.S. Senators. Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray gave their stamp to Hillary, but Governor Christine Gregoire weighed in at the last minute for the Barack Star.

Obama rocked tonight, but what that all means in the long run, the jury is still out. He has won twice as many states as Hillary, which is all super on paper, but means absolutely nothing if you count delegates. Texas and Ohio and Virginia are coming up. Hillary and her brain trust are sharpening their knives in anticipation. As much as I miss the Clinton Years, this is a crew that not only likes to win, it hates to lose, and they’ve got a Texas-sized can of whoop-ass in their holster that they’re not afraid to pull out and use on their own if it’s going to win them the votes that they need. Don’t be surprised if somewhere today, Dick Morris’ phone is ringing. Add enough zeros to the check, and he’ll take all the enmity he’s had for the Clintons in recent years and happily turn it on Barack Obama.

It’s going to take another day or so for my brain to assess the potential mutiny within the party if the superdelegates do their very dirty business. But I’m tired, and I’ve got a beehive-caliber buzz working. I’ll tackle this weighty issue tomorrow.

ON THE CLOCK AND OFF THE CAUCUS: Just to get this straight right now and not wait for some weisenheimer to try and “gotcha!” me as a Ben Affleck/Art Alexakis Sit Out The Vote Republican’t or Hypocrat in the coming weeks and months when I start berating people to be part of the process and lambasting the civicly lazy who will spend two hours painting their faces team colors or standing in line at WinCo to buy beer and nacho cheese before kickoff but can’t be bothered to spend less than an hour exercising their right to choose the next leaders of their city, state, and country, here you go: I didn’t caucus in Washington State today. It sucked and I wasn’t happy about it, but I had to be at one of my three jobs, 70 miles away, and I need beer, nourishment, and a roof over my head to continue this blog, and caucus rules and processes aren’t as flexible as those of the primary and general elections. Also, my utility providers like to be paid, and it encourages them to continue supplying me with electricity and Internet access.

I will be at my polling place next Tuesday either before or after work, or I’ll drive up from Portland on my lunch hour, when Washington holds their utterly useless primary. File this under “Washington Weak”–state delegates here are selected by caucus. The primary exists only to determine who’s cuter or has had better luck with their teeth whitener. It’s no way run a democracy, but I’ll be there, and I will cast my vote regardless. This is only one reason I want to move away and never darken this state’s doorstep with my shadow again. I want to live somewhere that takes the democratic process deadly serious and where every single vote is sacrosanct and counts. You know, like Ohio or Florida.

SHUSPENDED: Hell hath no fury like a Clinton scorned, and Hillary took her eye off Barack Obama to lambaste MSNBC and political reporter David Shuster for his unfortunate suggestion that Hillary’s deployment of Chelsea Clinton to woo the celebrities and super delegates might be at its core something less than motherly. “Doesn’t it seem”, Shuster asked, “like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” …….Well, you know that wasn’t going to end well. Shuster will be watching the Chesapeake Primary from his living room this Tuesday while he serves out his MSNBC suspension.

For my live results and analysis I kept it on MSNBC all night. When I come home from work, I’ll fire up the DVR and see how last night’s B Team pundits fared. First I’ll see how badly poor old Wolf Blitzer kept up on CNN. (Wolf hasn’t aged well as a news personality. If you watch Tom Brokaw or Mike Wallace, you get that sense of gravitas and an elder statesman’s wisdom. With Wolf, you get memories of Gulf War I and Arthur Kent, and keep waiting for him to slip up and make a Paul Tsongas allusion).

Then, about 8:0o PM, I’ll switch to my recorded FOX coverage, and sit down for my FOX News drinking game where I slam one shot glass of Foster’s ESB every time the phrase “true conservative” is offered in the affirmative for Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, and two shots when it’s offered in the negative for John McCain. I will be passed out drunk by 8:12 PM.

STEALTH ‘BAMA: By the time I was in the door and saw the margin for Hillary over Obama in New Jersey and Massachusetts, I polished two beers and two cigarettes in rapid succession and was glad I didn’t wager more than $20 on Obama in California. But as the evening wore on, with the exception of Arkansas, his margins were much huger than Hillary’s and with every small state that fell into his column throughout the night, the delegate count got closer and closer until around 9:00 PM PST–even 30 minutes after California was called for Hillary with barely 15% of the precincts reporting–Chuck Todd from MSNBC projected an Obama delegate win for the evening. The latest AP count as of 4:30 AM Wednesday has Clinton winning 584 Tuesday compared to Obama’s 563. That leaves him within 80 delegates of Hillary heading into Washington, Louisiana, and Nebraska. There was much talk last night among the Obama people about a “war of attrition” with Hillary, given that they’re beating her in fund-raising by a 3-to-1 margin. Hmmmm. A “war of attrition” with a Clinton has about as much to recommend it as the old joke about a land war in Asia. This might be the Obama campaign’s second blunder in the last twelve hours. (His other blunder came during a speech to supporters, and his failure to load the seats behind him with more Hispanics and white females–two blocs that have shown him too little love so far. Forget the general election; he needs to start courting them more aggressively if he wants to have a prayer in Texas and Ohio).

MCCAIN’T BUY ME LOVE: All the predictions of the Republicans holding their nose and coalescing around John McCain come Wednesday morning proved to be pure folly. With Baptist minister Mike Huckabee the surprise story of Super Tuesday, the most right-wing elements of the Republican Party aren’t giving their love to McCain. Focus On The Family chairman James Dobson announced after Tuesday voting that he would neither endorse nor vote for Senator McCain. McCain is scheduled later this week to address a conservative group whose invitation he shunned last year. “He better not wear white”, one analyst said, suggesting the possibility that the Senator could be pelted with tomatoes as he takes the rostrum and attempts to make peace with the exclusively Christian crowd.

ROMNEBUST: Enough’s enough, Governor. Just go home.

As the Republican establishment and pundit mafia shared a collective Chief Inspector Drefyuss-worthy apoplectic twitch at the increasing inevitability of Senator John McCain becoming the party’s standard-bearer, a brash, swaggering McCain strutted through the electoral landscape on the eve of Super Tuesday, assessing the terrain as if it were his choice and his choice alone where he’s going to slay Governor Romney and scatter his remains. His good-natured and eminently-likable toady, Governor Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, was busy glomming like a leach onto the few remaining veins on the body politic from which Romney could have hoped to draw a few pints of blood for a desperately needed transfusion.

The Republican junior officers and rank-and-file are beside themselves, knowing there’s little chance they might frag their presumptive new CO, much less his boyish lieutenant who’s gleefully skipping from one Romney opportunity to another, tossing live grenades into the middle of the crowd. On Dan Abrams’ prime-time segment tonight on MSNBC, you could see Pat Buchanan’s combed-over strands wilting from the rising steam as he watched the electoral map turn McCain Red and Huckabee Salmon, until he finally blurted in frustration that a Romney nomination would be a real possibility if it weren’t for the Huckabee drain of votes from Romney all throughout the southern contests. Mary Matalin voiced a similar frustration yesterday on NBC’s “Meet The Press”, even at one point calling the former Arkansas Governor “selfish”. Rush Limbaugh abandoned all pretense of elegance when he railed against Senator Lindsey Graham, the turncoat who helped deliver South Carolina for John McCain, that the South Carolinian is “certainly close enough to John McCain to die of anal poisoning”.

Mathematically, it’s not impossible that Romney hops up off the gurney and rushes triumphantly back into the game like Warren Beatty’s resurrected Joe Pendleton in “Heaven Can Wait”. Rush, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and the rest of the right-wing radio Scream Team are exhorting their millions of listeners to pull the lever for Romney and praying for a benevolent God to stuff the Arizona Senator back into any cage as far removed from a U.S. voting precinct as humanly possible.

Of course, they have the numbers. Mary Matalin pointed out on “Meet The Press” that Limbaugh’s audience is larger than all the voters who have cast ballots so far this primary season. It’s their commitment and pragmatism that aren’t fully sussed out at this point. In polling and any discussion where common sense hasn’t been checked at the door, there hasn’t been any serious, plausible indication that Mitt Romney wouldn’t get peeled like an onion in the general election. There isn’t a moment of footage from Romney’s 1994 Senatorial run against Ted Kennedy that isn’t sitting in a heavily guarded Democratic strategist’s safe right now. It would be one of the most delectable Chinese menus the Democrats have ever had in a general election: “Mmmm, I’ll take the tax hikes from Column A, and could I have the defense of gays in the military from Column B, please?”

For all their anti-Muslim rhetoric, there’s a distinctly Jihadist rebellion percolating within the party. Much like the shrill African-Americans on Stephanie Miller last week who pledged to vote for Mitt Romney if the now “racist” Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, there’s a lot of dark talk on the right of the rain of blood and severed limbs that will come down upon the party if McCain is chosen to head the ticket this fall. Ann Coulter last week tore off her blouse to reveal her explosive vest on “Hannity and Colmes” last week, threatening to pull the lever for Hillary and claim her 72 virgins if the Republicans don’t do the right thing and scoop up the circling-the-drain Romney.

Mike Huckabee’s endgame here is a Vice Presidential nod from John McCain. Well, Jesus Christ will sooner come back and declare all the fossils at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History plaster fakes before that happens. Granted, he’s a charming and well-spoken man, but as soon as he starts his fright-wing pontificating about rewriting the United States Constitution “in God’s standards” and measuring the age of the earth in quadruple digits, even most decent, mainstream Christians will refuse to appear on television without a digital black bar over their eyes.

Romney’s likely demise is only one story that’s going to be dominating the airwaves and the blogosphere today. It’s going to be a deliciously-long day for America’s armchair politicos as the polls start to open on the east coast.

KETTLES ONLY. WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO POTS: One of the most amusing developing narratives to watch today is MSNBC’s cautionary advice to watch how the media spins tonight’s results and to take everything with a grain of salt. Sage counsel indeed, as long as they’re including themselves in the day-long onslaught of oft-partisan coverage and dervish-like spin.

The 2007-08 season has been as maddeningly unpredictable in politics as it has been in sport. The safe–and smart–money has Mitt Romney coming home to the Bay State for an ignominious burial tomorrow night. He’s probably not too late to catch a ride into the afterworld with Gordon Humphries.

John McCain isn’t about to allow him a death with dignity, however. Sunday saw McCain stumping in Romney’s Massachusetts yesterday. It was a bold and probably unnecessarily cocky move on McCain’s part. He could argue that he was only there to accept the nomination of former Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci, but it was clearly a fighter wandering over to his wobbling opponent’s corner between rounds and spitting into his bucket, before retreating with a wink an a casual wipe of the mouth.

Everything portends doom for Mitt Romney on Tuesday night. Nearly every poll is showing McCain’s lead only widening, his endorsements are continuing to accumulate, there is almost no movement in Romney’s direction, and Mike Huckabee remains maddeningly, spoilingly in the race, continuing to siphon off votes from Mitt and trying to demonstrate to his friend McCain what a loyal, devoted toady he could be, just like a labrador–or even a Vice President. John McCain is talking and acting like a front-runner, and while it’s that kind of Patriotesque swagger that only makes people want to see you knocked off your pedestal, Mitt Romney is neither a plausible nor a lovable underdog.

The real fun is happening over in the Democrats’ camp. Both sides are managing expectations right now: Obama is surging, but if Hillary hangs on for a victory in California it will be a huge victory (even though 50% of California’s votes could have been cast before Obama’s momentum began, and the voter rolls are top-heavy with women and Hispanics, meaning Hillary could not only hold on but might actually win by 8% or 9% or more). Obama may have crested too early, and Hillary at least stanched the bleeding with their civil and dignified performance at last Thursday’s debate. Obama appreciates his surge, but he’s fighting a formidable and better-known candidate in Hillary Clinton, and the fact that they’re still in this fight is a victory in and of itself.

The Super Bowl was a much-easier bet to make, even if you took the Patriots. The Giants won in an upset, plain and simple. You take your licks, cost of doing business, any given Sunday, blah blah blah. There are so many factors in play for the Democrats on Super Tuesday that there won’t be any upsets or expected victories. There are 24 states and more than 2,000 delegates–and a maddening number of variables–in play tomorrow.

If you claim you know with near certainty how it’s going to play out, you know not of what you speak. The only responsible, professional, educated prognostication about what’s going to go down for the Democrats tomorrow is this: “I have no fucking clue.”

All the more reason why I’m going to step out on a ledge and take the only truly foolish bet open in this monster and monstrously-unpredictable contest: Never mind the absentee ballots, never mind the Hispanics and the women, with 38 hours before the polls close in the Golden State, on behalf of Veeps2008.com, I’m declaring Senator Barack Obama the winner in California by a margin of 47 to 41%.

I’ll take my earnings in praise and admiration tomorrow night at 8:01 PM when the news networks put that blue checkmark next to Obama’s name and nearly the identical numbers that I’ve written above. I’ve read the tea leaves, I’ve listened to my gut, and of this I’m certain.

I’m just not putting more than $20 on it.