Businessmen Always See The Handwriting On The Wall

A few days ago the conventional wisdom was that Mitt Romney would "fight on" after getting nipped by agonizingly thin margins in multiple contests (outside the New York City metro area, anyway), the worst being California, where he managed to carry a big, fat three congressional districts out of fifty-three, losing almost all the rest of them by one to three percentage points each.  Hugh Hewitt was, of course, enthusiastically flogging that line even though his guy's Golden State skunking had cost him the ability to prevent Darth Queeg from clinching the GOP nomination before the convention (Romney would have needed to sweep every remaining winner-take-all state plus win at least three-quarters of the vote in all other remaining states; suffice it to say, that wasn't gonna happen).  What point a traveling debate tour consisting largely of McCain pointing and laughing at doggedly nice-guy Romney while Huckabee serviced the Supreme Chancellor under his podium (figuratively speaking) was supposed to serve was never adequately communicated by the Romneylan preator, unless it was Hugh's reference to "talking up [a]center-right agenda" that is gleefully opposed by two of the three candidates in question.  If so, you can see how it was lost on me.

My take was much closer to Jim Geraghty's:

If the sense is that his campaign isn't being run to win, but being run to make a point, I think you'll see his support in subsequent states drop... I'm not sure the Romney campaign was built to be a protest candidacy...

Even if it had that capability, Mitt Romney is too nice a guy to try and do to McCain what McCain would have done to him in switched positions, and indeed tried to do to George W. Bush eight years ago.  Which, I suppose, goes to bolster the credibility of Romney's fundamental conservatism.  Our guys always do the mature thing, are never partisan, always lose gracefully, never try to "make a point" (which is a lot of why our guys lose), yet get relentlessly smeared as "extremists" and "sore losers" and the like.  Whereas a bona fide sore loser like McCain can spend a decade holding a grudge against his own party for denying him the "gold watch" he feels divinely entitled to, shiv, screw, and backstab his own core supporters at every opportunity for the raucous entertainment of the Enemy Media and his "good, close, personal friends" across the aisle, yet win his party's presidential nomination anyway - and it's his friendly fire victims who are supposed to sit down, shut up, and "reach out" to him like a supplicant kneeling before a throne.

I'd say that any Romney attempt to try and play spoiler would only deep-six his viability for trying again in 2012 and beyond, assuming he has any such future plans, except for McCain's utterly baffling success this go-'round.  But then Romney isn't in any position to infringe upon Sailor's turncoat gimmick.  Nor is he a petulant, disloyal, flip-flopping, megalomaniacal scoundrel with delusions of martyrhood.  A pity that those traits are evidently the new template for upward mobility in the GOP.

Still, whether or not Governor Romney recognized that dismal reality, I will let you in on the real reason he called it quits today: money.  Not that he's out of it, by any means.  Rather, being the successful businessman that he is, he recognized a failed venture when he saw one and the pointlessness of throwing good money after bad.  The man did not amass a fortune in the private sector by pursuing lost causes and indulging in self-delusion.  His goal was to win the GOP presidential nomination; until two days ago that was a viable proposition; after Super-Duper Tuesday, it no longer was.  End of venture.  Simple as that.

Better for Romney to fold his hand now, bide his time, let the "Bullbleep Express" totter and careen straight off the cliff in November and take the Rockefelleroids with it, all the while serving as loyal party man, campaigning for other 'Pubbies over the next few years, building up a stack of chits to be called in as 2012 approaches, polish up his conservative credentials, learn from his mistakes (whether that includes repudiating Mormonism is a question I'll leave to others to ponder), and enter the next cycle as THE presumptive frontrunner.  Or, in other words, what Dick Nixon did between 1964 and 1968, which included not only winning the White House, but also trouncing Mitt's father in the GOP primaries.

Hmmm; on second thought, maybe nice guys finishing last runs in the Romney family.

Double-H fans had better hope not, or their "new media" guru's party hackery will give him whiplash.

I'll get to the six billion and three reasons to fight McCain-Huckabee AND Rodham-Obama to the gates of hell tomorrow.

I promise.

Really.