I just got back from a week's vacation out of the country on Sunday. And I did my best to clear my head of politics while I was away. So I'm just now getting back in the rhythm of the campaign. And on the Republican side, it still looks like Romney to me. But that's by a by-default logic that applies almost uniquely to this campaign.

Clearly, Romney has had a bad few weeks as Huckabee has rocketed from being Ron Paul's colleague down in the single digits to the leader or near leader in several key states. Hell, he's almost tied with Rudy for the lead nationally. But as we're now seeing day after day with Huckabee, despite the affable manner and the politics that are gaining him huge support within the GOP's evangelical base, the dude just has way too much baggage to get him to the nomination -- letting a bunch of anti-Clinton whacks convince you to let a serial rapist out of prison, all sorts of completely whacked views, wild unpreparedness on foreign policy. And they haven't even gotten to truly nutball ideas he's for like the 'Fair Tax'. I'm not saying it can't happen. But I just think Huckabee's got too much baggage on too many fronts.

Then you have Rudy, of whom I've already said quite a bit. Republican voters are starting to realize that pro-choice wasn't just a policy position for Rudy. He lived a lifestyle as mayor that made it a critical option to have on hand at any given moment. With Huckabee's rise, attention has gone off Rudy's mix of boffo boffing scandals and shady business deals. But there's still so much more to be scrutinized, especially on the latter front, when and if the attention returns.

My own take is that Rudy's campaign is near a tipping point. As long as he was dominating the national polls and running strong in big starts on or after February 5th, there was a case to be made that he could afford to getting shellacked in the early states. But he's now close to nose-diving in the national polls and he's fallen in almost every state. If the fall continues nationally, he's going to be tied or just competitive nationally. And you're going to hit a tipping point, a crisis of confidence in Rudy's campaign, where suddenly there's no ace in the hole to get people to ignore the fact that he's going to get clobbered in each of the early contests that almost always determine the course of the rest of the campaign. At that point the emperor of New York City will be exposed as having no clothes, not even silk pajamas-cum-Hef-pipe to amble from one assignation to the next.

And that leaves us with ... Mitt Romney.

Incredibly phony, endless flipflops and with the Mormon issue that will probably keep him from ever dominating the GOP's evangelical base. But a fairly strong campaigner and probably no boffo scandal that makes you scratch your head and wonder what the guy was smoking.

So, all humor aside, despite his campaign's being in the doldrums and facing real danger in Iowa, by process of elimination, it still seems to me that Mitt Romney's the man to beat in the GOP.