Without a dog in the fight, I'm rooting for a good slugfest. One needn't a vested interest in a contest to appreciate good competition. Spectators can merely enjoy the spectacle.

Should John McCain win tonight in Michigan, it's basically over. Mitt Romney drops out or becomes irrelevant. Rudy Giuliani, who banks on the support of people believing in his electibility, will see his supporters flock to McCain. Huckabee, without the half dozen candidates splitting the remainder of the vote, retains his evangelical support--but his piece of the pie shrinks relative to the competition (John McCain). The frontrunner will subsume the votes he had split with his since departed competitors. Republicans are frontrunners. They are the boring party. Someone who looks like he will win, will win. That's what John McCain will have going for him. He will be hard to stop.

So, if you are a political junkie, and want to witness history--a brokered convention in an era when early primaries are supposed to make such possibilities impossibilities--hope for a Mitt Romney win in Michigan tonight. What a chain of events it could set off. In South Carolina, voters will see it's still a race and perhaps vote for Mike Huckabee. In Florida, where Rudy Giuliani still leads in polls, the New Yorker could finally get his campaign on track. Mitt Romney would have reason to stick around through Super Tuesday.

And what a Super Tuesday it will be should no frontrunner emerge from Michigan. Twenty-one states will vote in GOP primaries or caucuses on February 5. Giuliani-friendly states such as New York and California will vote. The Romney home states of Massachusetts and Utah will cast ballots, as will McCain's Arizona. Five "Bible Belt" states could boost Huckabee. Without a national candidate, candidates will post victories in the regions on which they concentrate, throwing a monkey wrench in the process--so obviously designed to pick a candidate early on--that threatens to elongate the nominating season until early September, when the Republicans nominate a candidate. What's usually a formality could be anything but this year. With several candidates without incentive to drop out, each receiving boosts in varying parts of the country, delegates could give no candidate a majority.

This is the stuff of political dreams. Alas, dreams usually don't come true.