Super Bowl, Super Tuesday, Fat Tuesday . . . what I wanna know is, do you really think that a President John McCain would let the Pentagon buy tankers from Boeing?

Sometime this month, the Pentagon is expected to decide - finally - whether it wants Boeing or Airbus aircraft to be its next aerial refueling jets, and announce who is going to get the $40 billion deal to provide the first 179 KC-X tankers.

I'd say the odds are about 5:2 in Boeing's favor. Boeing has built every tanker that the U.S. Air Force has ever flown - including the KC-135s that the new jets would replace - and has more experience designing, building and maintaining refueling tankers than anyone else on the planet. Plus, they're the home team.

The analysts that Bloomberg talks with think that Boeing will land the contract. But there's also a school of thought among analysts that the Pentagon will split the contract, buying both Boeing's KC-767 and the EADS/Northrop KC-30.

I don't think that's likely, not with the state of the federal budget. A split contract will likely mean higher per-plane costs, and it will definitely mean higher operating costs (because the Air Force would have two maintain two sets of spares, two separate crew training programs, etc.). President Bush is talking about cutting health care for the poor; it's going to be a hard sell to get a Democratic Congress to spend extra money to keep a couple of global defense giants happy while denying cash for sick grandmas to see a doctor.

So which plane to pick? Scott Hamilton, the Master of Sammamish suggests the Airbus KC-30 may just be the more-capable plane. Airlines certainly seemed to think so; the whole reason Boeing developed the 787 was because Airbus' A330 was outselling the older 767 by a wide margin in the mid- and late '90s.

Boeing certainly hasn't covered itself with glory with its first attempts to turn the 767 into a tanker. The KC-767s for the Italian and Japanese air forces are years behind schedule.

On the other hand, EADS isn't a paragon for on-time deliveries either. Its A400M military transport also is years behind schedule, and a billion or so over budget. And anyone who's been paying any attention at all can tell you how difficult it is for an aerospace joint venture to set up an all-new factory to build aircraft with an inexperienced workforce in the Southeast United States, as EADS and Northrop propose to do with the KC-30 down in Alabama - and Boeing did with big chunks of the 787 in South Carolina.

Plus, it's not like the KC-767 would be a dog. It would be more fuel-efficient than the KC-30, and able to operate from more airfields. The Air Force liked it well enough that it was ready to lease 100 of them, before the Druyun scandal.

So what's going to happen? I think the Pentagon will pick Boeing planes. EADS and Northrop then will appeal the decision - because that's what one does - and it will get thrown into the political realm. Can the Gulf Coast Republicans who back the EADS/Northrop team steal the deal away from Norm Dicks and Patty Murray? With a Democratic majority in Congress, one wouldn't think so.

But that's where McCain comes in. Nobody has been a bigger opponent of Boeing's tanker programs. He opposed the first Boeing tanker deal (100 planes, for $23 billion) because it was structured as a lease. The real problem with the deal was that the Pentagon procurement officer in charge was crooked, a fact that McCain came across after he subpoenaed a whole lot of e-mails.

That's the problem for Boeing. Its optics stink. The first tanker deal resulted in two people going to jail and CEO Phil Condit's resignation - and it established McCain as an anti-corruption crusader. (Keating Five? Who?) And now the General Accounting Office is suspicious of an Air Force decision to award Boeing a maintenance contract on the current fleet of KC-135s.

President Bush already has signed one Boeing tanker deal. Count him as a tepid Boeing supporter, should the deal get to him before he leaves office. But what if McCain is the confirmed as the nominee when the deal reaches Bush's desk? Would Bush go against his party's favorite on this?

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is backed by the aerospace Machinists union - so she'll support the Boeing bid - but how well does a tainted tanker deal fit into the "Change We Can Believe In" agenda of Barack Obama? Would he really go to the mat with McCain, back in his seat in the Senate, over this?