I just got back from a week’s vacation out of the country. And I did my best to clear my head of politics while I was away. So that’s allowed me to come back to the political races with a bit of a fresh perspective.

Back in November I was looking at the trend-lines for the GOP primary and caucus races in the key early states. For all the horserace noise, one fact was really clear when you just looked at those graph lines. Mitt Romney was consistently moving up everywhere, and Rudy was either stable or falling. It looked like a pretty good bet that Romney could either sweep the first big three races or at least get two out of the three and run respectably in South Carolina.

A lot’s changed over the last six weeks. But with everything that’s happened, I’m still where I was in November. For the GOP primary battle, it still looks to me like Romney’s the one to beat, if only by a by-default logic that applies almost uniquely to this campaign.

Allow me to explain.

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 guy just has way too much baggage to get him to the nomination — letting a bunch of anti-Clinton wackos convince him 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 Huckabee’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. And if Rudy does better than expected in the early races, that scrutiny will be back with a vengeance.

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 states on or after Feb. 5, 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, even if sometimes by relatively small margins, in almost every state. If that fall continues nationally, soon 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-Hugh Hefner pipe to amble from one assignation to the next.

And that leaves us with ... Mitt Romney.

Incredibly phony. He’s flip-flopped on virtually every political question. And the Mormon issue will probably keep him from ever dominating the GOP’s evangelical base. But he’s a fairly strong campaigner and there’s probably no boffo scandal waiting in the wings 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 despite the real danger he faces in Iowa, by process of elimination, it still seems to me that Mitt Romney’s the man to beat in the GOP.