Good-bye to Governor Romney

Governor Romney went all out for the nomination and fell short. He had the good grace to bow out yesterday in light of McCain's victories and the need for the party to start to coalesce around one candidate. He spent at least $35 million of his own money, but that wasn't enough to help voters get to know and like Romney. But voters never warmed up to him. As Krauthammer points out, it wasn't until Giuliani and Thompson dropped out that many conservatives turned to Romney as their last chance to stop McCain.

That left Romney, the final stop in the search for the compelling conservative. I found him to be a fine candidate who would have made a fine president. But until very recently, he was shunned by most conservatives for ideological inauthenticity. Then, as the post-Florida McCain panic grew, conservatives tried to embrace Romney, but the gesture was both too late and as improvised and convenient-looking as Romney's own many conversions.

No one has been a bigger supporter of Romney than Hugh Hewitt who wrote a book about the possibility of Mitt getting elected. And Hewitt was convinced of the character, brains, and qualifications of Romney.

Because he is a very good man, a great conservative and an extraordinary patriot he is standing aside to allow Senator McCain's national campaign to commence. There were excellent reasons for Romney to stay in the hunt, including the opportunity to score some impressive victories in places like Ohio, which might have served Romney well in any future campaign.

Romney's decision to "stand aside," and especially the reasons he gave just now in his CPAC speech underscore the qualities I found so compelling in him, and confirm for me my decision to support him made many months ago. Had the conservative movement more quickly recognized these qualities, the coming together around Romney that has occurred in the last few weeks would have assured him the nomination and, I think, the White House. But it didn't, and now the task is to assure that Senator McCain succeeds President Bush for the very reasons Mitt Romney outlined today.

The campaign ahead is first and foremost about victory in the war. As Romney argued today, Senators Clinton and Obama are committed to retreat, and Senator McCain to victory in that war. That's all the reason any conservative should need to fully support Senator McCain now that his nomination is assured.

The failure of Romney's campaign is testimony to the fact that a candidate can't buy the nomination. No one on the Republican side spent more than Mitt Romney. He had a well-organized campaign and spent a fortune on ads, but even after inundating Iowa with his ads, the voters just didn't warm up to him. Byron York has this little fact that demonstrates the ceiling that Romney came up against everywhere except the places he had a personal contact with or a few caucuses at the end where voters just didn't want either McCain or Huckabee.

He hired a lot of people, spent millions to build organizations in key states, and then spent millions more for television and radio advertisements. The day after the Iowa caucuses, I dropped by WHO radio in Des Moines, and a top station official told me that Romney had been WHO’s second-biggest advertiser in 2007. (First was Monsanto farm chemicals.) In all, Romney pumped $1 million into WHO’s bank account. In South Carolina recently, a local politico marveled at how much money Romney’s in-state consultants made from the campaign. “Those guys made a mint out of him,” the politico told me. “It’s sinful how much they made.”

And a lot of those ads were negative ones about Huckabee and then McCain. As Jay Cost argues, Romney already had a strong unfavorable rating and running such a slew of attack ads didn't do anything great for his favorability rating. People hadn't warmed up to the guy to begin with and people just didn't like all those attacks. It's futile to try and figure out if Romney could have overcome those unfavorability assessments if he'd run a different sort of campaign concentrating on his executive experience and not as the real Republican in the race. Perhaps he could work on perceptions of him among the Republicans and come back in another election. I heard Bill Bennett push him to be RNC chairman and think that would be an excellent idea. He could put his executive and organizing skills to work and then go on TV and appear opposite Howard Dean. It is an intriguing idea.