Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney suspended his run for the White House today in the wake of his disappointing showing in the Super Tuesday primaries this week.
Just this past weekend, Romney stated that Mike Huckabee needed to get out of the race because he was preventing Romney from denying John McCain the nomination. Huckabee responded that such a request required a lot of gall and that he was offended by the suggestion. Huckabee went on to say that if anyone should drop out of the race, it should be Romney.
All evidence indicates that Huckabee was right. And now, Romney has done just that.
Romney spent an estimated 40 million of his 250 million dollar personal fortune in his run for the White House, an effort which netted him a total of 286 delegates. That's about $150,000 of his own money spent for each delegate. As Barack Obama observed in the last Democratic debate before Super Tuesday, that's not exactly a stellar return on his investment.
Despite far outspending his rivals for the GOP nomination, Romney lost in Iowa to Mike Huckabee. His campaign never really recovered. Romney never really connected with the voters, despite his being embraced by conservative talk show hosts and even by evangelical leaders - a bit of a surprise since Romney is a devout Mormon.
Romney's suggestion that Huckabee step aside for him did seem inappropriate considering the Romney campaign's basic lack of electoral success. Had Romney been the clear choice of the majority of conservatives and evangelicals, that would be a different story, but he was not. Also, the assumption that Huckabee's departure would greatly benefit Romney was suspect. Most exit polls on Tuesday showed McCain to be the second choice of Huckabee voters. Plus, exit polls on Tuesday clearly showed voters were choosing candidates based on character, not on the issues - a big change for Republican voters.
In an article on Time.com, Mark Halperin suggests ten things that Romney could have done differently. Among those were "could have recognized that his biggest problem was a perceived lack of humanity, and addressed it with humor, purpose, and authenticity" and "could have consistently presented his own personality—disciplined, ambitious, take-charge, impersonal, passionate about his family and his religion—rather than tried to fit himself into a series of established Republican templates."
Most observers feel Romney's departure makes McCain a shoo-in as the GOP nominee. But, if the vast majority of Romney supporters were to bolt to the Huckabee camp, this could be a horse race: The combined delegate total for the two (depending on whose count you believe) is somewhere around 500, with McCain's total in the high 600s.
Our strange political year keeps getting stranger by the day. Oh how the mighty have fallen...and continue to fall!
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