The Flaws in John McCain's Domino Theory

After six years in a Vietcong prison camp, John McCain knows all about the Domino Theory. And three decades later, the Arizona senator still appears to have trains of chips on his mind, hoping that his win in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary is the first one to fall on the way to the Republican presidential nomination. There's just one problem with this metaphor: Domino trains work only when the pieces are evenly spaced. A small piece collapsing into three or four chips stacked together is stopped short. Likewise, the McCain Express could run into a dead stop on March 7 when it hits 16 states at once.

McCain triumphed in New Hampshire in part by shaking hands at every middle school and library in a small state, but as the race goes national, he won't have that luxury. His big task is to translate that win into the two Big Ms — Money and Momentum. "Winning New Hampshire by such a large margin [19 points] certainly gives him a lot of steam heading into the other states," says TIME Washington correspondent Matthew Cooper. "But just as it was foolish to consider Bush coronated a couple of weeks ago, it'd be just as foolish to consider McCain any sort of front-runner now. Bush still has a lot of money, which counts for a lot, and he's not going to sit still and let McCain's people convince the country of what a good guy they've got."

Still, there are signs that the domino train has been set in motion. After barely totaling $1.4 million in the months leading to New Hampshire, online donations to McCain's web site surpassed $800,000 in the 48 hours following the win. Polls that last week had Bush ahead by 20 points in South Carolina now have the race too close to call. Meanwhile, on Thursday the McCain Express toppled a major hurdle when New York governor George Pataki (who's reportedly angling for the No. 2 spot on a Bush for President ticket), bowed to popular demand and pressed Republican party heads to include McCain on the ballots of all of the state's voting districts.

If nothing else, McCain's New Hampshire victory has cut sharply into Bush's biggest selling point — that he's a winner. Pundits point to the lopsided loss in the Granite State as proof that perma-smirked Dubya doesn't have the broad appeal the party bosses once thought he did. Other self-professed realists maintain that Bush will still coast — the Texas governor has four times as much cash on hand as McCain, not to mention the support of the party establishment in virtually every state. What's more, most states don't allow registered independents, a key factor in New Hampshire, to vote in their primaries. This, along with the votes of conservatives wary of McCain who'll abandon the right-leaning Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes in favor of the more plausible Bush, could be what it takes to derail the domino train.