Romney's a loser

Stephen Stark articulates what I've been thinking for a little while now, and what was strikingly confirmed by the Super Duper Tuesday results:

The problem for conservatives isn't that their vote has been divided (though some of it has been split between Romney and Mike Huckabee). It's that Romney is too unpopular to be the standard bearer of anything. Romney tried to win the nomination the old-fashioned way: by buying it. Yet even though he overwhelmingly outspent all his opponents, he's never showed much vote-getting ability. In complete contrast with Obama, the more voters saw of Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire, the less they liked him. He achieved the singular feat of having failed to receive the endorsement of a single newspaper editorial board in New Hampshire. He pretty much bombed out on Super Tuesday, failing to win as many primaries as Huckabee. In fact, his most noteworthy contribution to politics this year is the way he has united every candidate in the Republican race around their personal dislike of him. Now it comes out that, despite Romney's being the candidate who has been the most supportive of the incumbent, even President Bush is angry with him for his flip-flip on immigration. Romney also faces an awful calendar in the next few weeks, since McCain should run strongly both in the DC-area primaries next week and in the larger states in early March. So while Romney and his allies may not realize it yet, he's never going to win the nomination -- and he's not gaining any friends, either, by continuing to contest the race. Better to join the bandwagon and position himself for a potential place on the McCain ticket. (Yes, that's likelier than it seems today.)

The Republican campaign has been dominated by this one single fact: the establishment candidates (Romney, Thompson) are/were lousy. They couldn't convince people to vote for them. Thompson was such a lethargic campaigner, and Romney comes off as fake and just not likable. I did think that Romney would turn things around with Super Duper Tuesday, since Huckabee didn't have the cash or time to effectively campaign (I thought) and Romney was pushing the vote-for-an-electable-conservative argument, which I thought would be effective (it wasn't).