Unpersuasive to the end

AND SO it ends for Mitt Romney.

Two days after publicly declaring that he would forge ahead despite disappointing Super Tuesday results, Romney yesterday bowed to the inevitable and suspended his presidential campaign.

In his major public moves, Romney likes to portray himself as answering a greater calling than personal interest or ambition.

He and his team have long cast his profile-enhancing work leading the 2002 Winter Olympics as altruistic national service he undertook only reluctantly. When he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney said he was responding to entreaties from voters.

Yesterday, in announcing his decision during a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Romney once again reached for a selfless rationale. This time, it was to let the Republican Party ready its general election campaign.

After mentioning Ronald Reagan's to-the-convention crusade against Gerald Ford in 1976, Romney said the important difference was that "today we are a nation at war" - and that the Democrats "would retreat [and] declare defeat."

If he were to fight all the way to the convention, Romney said, he would "forestall the launch of a national campaign and frankly, I'd be making it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win."

Then, in a particularly objectionable remark, he added: "Frankly, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

Having taken that partisan shot, Romney summed up this way: "If this were only about me, I'd go on. But it's never been only about me. I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America, in this time of war, I feel I have to now stand aside, for our party and for our country."

To which one can only say this: What a colossal wagonload of, um, malarkey.

In fact, simple math applied to delegates and dollars foretold yesterday's decision.

With so many winner-take-all Republican contests, Tuesday's results had put Romney prohibitively far behind front-runner John McCain, who led him 707 delegates to 294. It would have been exceedingly difficult to catch up.

Romney had already invested some $35 million of his own fortune in his campaign. Say this for him: He's too unsentimental a businessman to throw good millions after bad in what had become a doomed quest.

In one way, yesterday's speech was fitting: It was an unpersuasive end to an unpersuasive campaign.

Certainly Romney started with plenty of advantages. Tall, handsome, fabulously wealthy, well-spoken, and with a photogenic family and an impressive business career, he seemed like a candidate straight from central casting.

But in the end, his campaign foundered for one basic reason: He lacked authenticity.

Romney started positioning himself to run for president early on in his single term as governor, but his efforts to remake himself as a conservative left him facing an embarrassing trail of past statements and videos in which he had taken more moderate or even liberal stands.

His campaign looked transparently expedient, and no wonder. It was.

That sense of inconsistency was only strengthened as Romney tried any number of political approaches, then jettisoned them in the face of new circumstances.

His strategy was predicated on winning Iowa and then New Hampshire, and riding that momentum to a commanding political position. Instead, Iowa Republicans turned to Mike Huckabee, whose standing as an ordained Southern Baptist minister made him more appealing to evangelicals than Romney, a Mormon.

After Romney's second place finish in Iowa, New Hampshire settled on McCain, an old Granite State favorite and a candidate who displayed the very sense of authenticity Romney so lacked.

Michigan briefly resurrected Romney's flagging hopes, but once McCain won in South Carolina and Florida, the Arizona senator was on a path to dominate Super Tuesday. And he did, winning a number of big states that might have been natural ground for Romney had he not tried to recast himself as the conservative favorite.

So where does Romney go from here? Yesterday's speech was an obvious attempt to endear himself further with conservatives, as well as stress larger areas where he agreed with McCain.

If he'd run a less sharp-elbowed campaign, Romney might merit a look as a VP pick. As it is, McCain's dislike for his rival seems almost palpable. And yet, Romney fans can find a bit of hope in history. After all, campaign annals are full of ticketmates who could barely tolerate each other.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.