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Having spent much of 2011 writing incessantly about the Republican presidential nominating contest, I’m simultaneously relieved and saddened by the impending end of the “invisible primary” and the beginning, with next Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses, of the actual voting. In the words of Jerry Garcia: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” And the oddest thing of all is that the outcome most often predicted by the laziest and most conventional-wisdom-bound analysts, the nomination of Mitt Romney, is now, according to InTrade, something on the order of an 80 percent probability.