The Other McCain

Chris Moody and Steven Crowder with Crowder’s haawwtt fianceé, Hillary,
at the Santorum event in Grand Rapids, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012

“Another Wednesday morning, another hotel room, another grim bout with the TV Morning News . . . These goddamn Wednesday mornings are ruining my health.”
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

OBERLIN, Ohio
When I woke up in an interstate highway rest area somewhere west of Lansing, Michigan, this morning, it was half-past seven, and a four-hour nap in my car had scarcely touched the surface of the overwhelming fatigue that had forced me to pull over about 3 a.m. and conk out.

After getting a cup of “Premium Roast Coffee” from the vending machine — yeah, right — I cranked up the car and began driving back toward the hotel in Troy. The GPS told me I’d be there before 9:30, so I envisioned a quick shower, then napping an hour or two in an actual bed before I had to pack up and leave by noon. By 3 p.m., I’d be at my sister-in-law’s house in Ohio, ready to sling together another column from a state that is sure to be a key battleground in next week’s Super Tuesday contests.

Once I was on the road, I called my wife, and the call completely scrambled my plans. My wife informed me of a family emergency (never mind the details) which obviously required my presence at home. News of this sudden personal misfortune, following so closely on the heels of political misfortune, only aggravated the sense of gloom that had seized me as I watched the vote totals being updated at Rick Santorum’s Tuesday night party at the Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids. You may get a sense of my mood from my American Spectator column today:

Rick Santorum lost Tuesday’s primary here in Michigan. All the spin in the world can’t change that fact, and if Mitt Romney goes on to win the Republican presidential nomination, political historians will point to Feb. 28 as his watershed moment. Exactly how Santorum or any other GOP rival can beat Romney now is an increasingly difficult scenario to describe.
The best way to understand the significance of Mitt’s win in Michigan is to imagine the opposite result: Had Santorum won here in Romney’s home state, it would have been a shattering blow to the aura of “inevitability” and “electability” that has always been Romney’s strongest argument as the “It’s His Turn” candidate whom the Republican Party traditionally nominates. A win on Romney’s home turf would have sent Santorum surfing a tidal wave of momentum going into next week’s Super Tuesday contests in 10 states. Had Santorum won Michigan, it would have set off panic in the ranks of the GOP establishment, stirring new talk of a brokered convention to anoint a “respectable” candidate like Jeb Bush or Mitch Daniels — someone, anyone! — as the nominee.
Instead, after an all-out battle that lasted three weeks since Santorum’s Feb. 7 triple wins in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri, Romney scored a narrow victory in Michigan that will enable the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign to boast of a “comeback” that ratifies his claim to legitimacy as the rightful heir to the nomination. . . .

Read the whole thing. It didn’t help my mood, of course, that WiFi problems kept me offline until 11 p.m. Tuesday night, so that I had to write my column in a blazing hurry just to file it at 1 a.m. Furthermore, the attempt of some Santorum supporters to sugar-coat the Michigan disaster — to pretend that it was something other than a disaster — only made my mood worse.

I hate losing and second place is not a victory. It is defeat, a failure, and while I understand the need of a presidential campaign to put the best possible public spin on a lost primary, I don’t like being spun. If you lost the vote by 3 points, don’t talk to me about delegate counts.

I don’t want to hear that crap. You lost. Continue reading Memo From the National Affairs Desk:
‘If I Could Walk That Way …’ →