How McCain Won

Last summer John McCain's campaign was left for dead. Today, after taking the winner-take-all Virginia Primary, along with Maryland and the District of Columbia, he stands on the verge of gaining the Republican nomination for president. The venerable candidate, so short of funds he had to mothball his spacious motor home for a van, and whose senior brain trust had begun fleeing his sinking campaign in droves, will soon eliminate his last remaining serious challenger and lead his party into the general election. It's one of the great political comeback stories in recent memory. How it happened can be summed up in four words: Thompson, Huckabee, Giuliani and time. The great might-have-been is Mitt Romney.

Romney was a formidable candidate. He had good looks and an unbroken record of effectiveness in private business, the Olympic Games and as Governor of Massachusetts. There has never been the slightest hint of personal scandal about him. On top of that he had nearly limitless funds to commit to the race. Romney crafted a winning strategy against the projected field. He would run to the right of McCain and Rudy Giuliani and slightly to the left of Bible Belt social conservatives Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee. McCain and Giuliani would split the moderate vote to his left. Thompson and Huckabee would split the conservative vote to his right. Romney would have the 35% of moderate conservatives in the middle all to himself while the other four came in at 15% each. Ron Paul and arch-conservatives Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo would siphon up the rest. It was a good strategy. Then everything fell apart for him and into the waiting arms of John McCain.

McCain's first break came with the entry of Fred Thompson into the contest, if it can be characterized as such. After waiting so long to get in that much of the early enthusiasm for drafting him had dissipated, Thompson proved an absolute flop on the campaign trail. With his lackluster performances and paucity of message he could have been dubbed the Sominex candidate.

This opened the door for Huckabee. With no competition for the social conservative vote, Huckabee quickly gobbled up the lion's share of it and won the opening round at the Iowa caucuses. Speaking like the affable Baptist preacher he once was, Huckabee could relate to born-agains in the images and terminologies they knew and loved. He not only absorbed the predicted Thompson vote but ate into Romney's right flank. Romney began repositioning himself as a true dyed-in-the-wool conservative to fend off this encroachment.

McCain's next break was the implosion of Rudy Giuliani. Leading in national polls into early December, Giuliani's support proved to be of the "mile wide and inch deep" variety. Though hurt by allegations of spending city funds for the security of his then-mistress, Giuliani's difficulty was more basic than that. His real problem was that the more voters saw him the less they liked him. The abrasive New Yorker seemed to rub everybody the wrong way. His numbers dropped faster than a Buffalo thermometer in January. With no competition for the moderate vote, McCain grabbed Rudy's will o' the wisp adherents. With Romney's fire directed now at Huckabee, McCain began making unopposed inroads into Romney's left flank as well. McCain won the New Hampshire Primary. Romney was now trapped between the unified left and right wings of the party. Faced with a Faustian choice, he decided to take out the upstart preacher first and go after McCain once that was done. He never got the chance. Huckabee's bloc had solidified and could not be budged. Once Romney's moderate support began defecting to McCain he went after the Arizonan, but by then it was too late. On Super Tuesday Huckabee ran wild in the South and McCain swept California and the big states of the Northeast. Romney's success in Massachusetts and the Mountain West wasn't enough. He was done.

McCain's last ally was time. Enough of it had elapsed to take the sting out of some of the pre-campaign positions he had taken that rankled conservatives. Conservative anger based on his voting against the Bush tax cuts, supporting McCain-Kennedy-Bush immigration reform and McCain-Feingold campaign reform had receded just enough that Huckabee couldn't stop him far from the South. Enough of it had elapsed to make his support for the Iraq surge seem providential to most Republicans. And too little of it remained for the cash-strapped Huckabee to overcome the delegate lead McCain had amassed in his big winner-take all victories.

Thus reads the remarkable story of John McCain's improbable march to the nomination in 2008. He may go on to make history as the oldest president elected to a first term. But whether or not he does he has already made history in a primary season the like of which may not be seen again.