In withdrawing from the Republican presidential race, Mitt Romney did not so much concede defeat as claim victory for second place.
"I was in single digits in the polls and I was facing household Republican names," he said, referring to his standing one year ago. "As of today, more than 4 million people have given me their vote for president, less than Senator McCain's 4.7 million, but quite a statement nonetheless. Eleven states have given me their nod, compared to his 13."
The language was no accident. In the Republican Party, unlike the Democratic Party, finishing second is considered an achievement, not a rejection: Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were each second-place finishers at one time, and Bob Dole secured the nomination in 1996 after finishing second eight years earlier, just as John McCain now seems to have done.
At 60, Romney is still young enough to have some future hopes in a party where the elephant has been not only a symbol of the GOP but a metaphor for its aged nominees: Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Dole, and now McCain have all aimed for the White House at a time of life when most people are looking for retirement homes.
But those figures all found good uses for their years between campaigns, with Bush winning the vice presidency and Dole and McCain returning to the Senate. Romney has no public job to return to, and his timely withdrawal probably will not offset the accumulated bad blood between him and McCain, making a vice-presidential nod unlikely.
Moreover, the evidence from the campaign trail suggests Romney would have to work on his message. He remains an untrustworthy figure to many conservative Republicans. This is not an insurmountable barrier - both Bush and Dole faced largely the same problem - but they at least ran their first races as moderates and then moved rightward before running again. Romney's sometimes desperate attempts to portray himself as a conservative may have been at the root of his problems this year.
It was somehow fitting that his campaign would end with a speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference - the event he flooded with supporters last year and where he claimed victory in the group's straw poll, enabling him to present himself as the true conservative in the race.
It was an image and a platform that never jibed with Romney's persona as a businessman with a pragmatic record in public life; and as Romney pushed conservative issues on the campaign trail, he only invited critics to point out ways in which he had veered from that course in the past.
In the end, all those inconsistencies combined with a somewhat plastic presence on the stump made Romney seem inauthentic and opportunistic - a meat-and-potatoes car guy in Michigan who morphed into a Pollo Tropico lover in Florida.
Romney furthered those impressions by changing his emphasis in state after state, from being a social conservative in Iowa, to an anti-Washington crusader in New Hampshire, to an economic nationalist in Michigan, to the one true Reaganite who played to right-wing talk shows in the days leading up to Super Tuesday.
By the time Romney took the stage in Boston on Tuesday night, wearing the frozen smile of a politician desperate to stave off defeat, his message had unraveled into a series of generic platitudes and warnings.
"I'm convinced - and I mean this very sincerely - I'm convinced that if Washington continues on its same course, America will emerge not as the great nation of the 21st century by the end, but as a second-tier power," Romney said. "It will be passed by someone else. I can't tell you who it will be, but it would be passed by someone else. That will not happen. We'll keep America strong because we'll hold on to the values that have always made us successful, values that Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and Teddy Roosevelt and other great presidents spoke about."
Reagan and Bush lost before they won. Yesterday, Romney, in the back of his mind, was probably thinking of the same thing. Stepping aside early to allow McCain to prepare for the fall campaign should win him some good will from both McCain and the party. But his reasoning - that he still felt he had a shot to win but that a long GOP campaign would only help Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama - may have seemed disingenuous to some Republicans, especially since the Democratic race shows no signs of ending.
Over the 12 months that he was running, Mitt Romney showed himself to be a credible presidential candidate. He earned what he has called the Silver Medal and, perhaps, an option for the future. 
