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Mitt Romney, The Silver Medalist

Mitt Romney's on the tube right now, conceding New Hampshire at 8:45 p.m. It's a sorry sight. He looks absolutely exhausted -- his eyes are rimmed in dark and are incredibly wide, like they're propped open with invisible toothpicks, or like he's slowly morphing into a cartoon version of himself. "I thought we knew New Hampshire," he joked, "but now we really know New Hampshire." Yikes. It's a meltdown, on a narrative level, just as tragic as Hillary's felt right after Iowa (maybe to be reversed?), but all the more so because: Who saw this all coming? What Bainie could have predicted the bizarre ascendance of an underfunded weight-loss miracle over organizational perfection?

-- Eve Fairbanks