Hugh Hewitt on McCain and the race:

The unfortunate byproduct of the McCain bubble in New Hampshire is the obligation to revisit why it is that McCain faded in the first place. It would have been better all around if he'd bowed out after a disappointing finish in the Granite State, a resolute voice for victory, an American hero, but a fellow who's time had come and gone. But Huck's rise in Iowa combined with the Lieberman endorsement has created a certain to be short-lived boomlet in McCain futures. It also reminds us why he faded in the first place when he ought to have been triumphing in the way MSM has been predicting since 2004.

Let's start with the Gang of 14 coup that undercut a carefully calibrated strategy developed between then Majority Leader Frist and the White House, a coup that still rankles. The line of stalled judicial nominees --good men and women whom John McCain threw under the bus for a headline, along with other nominees sacrificed in the spring of 2006-- is long and growing longer with every month. Senator McCain avoids every serious discussion of his failed "compromise" and declares that he saved the judicial filibuster for the GOP, an extra-constitutional power the GOP ought not to want. Up-or-down votes for nominees who clear committee was the rule that Frist and the vast majority of Republicans wanted --the constitutional option. John McCain put his interests ahead of those of the party and the base. It was the moment that undid his comeback with the party willing to forgive the McCain-Feingold folly, and he hasn't recovered and cannot recover because the courts mean so much to each part of the party, but not to Senator McCain.

To that sharp memory of McCain as anti-party maverick, add the McCain grandstanding of September, 2006 when Bill Frist convened the Senate with a timetable to address the treatment and interrogation of terrorists, surveillance of terrorists and confirmation of judicial nominees beginning with Peter Keisler, and Senators McCain and Graham threw in enough monkeywrenches to derail the entire schedule --for what? The language on torture that emerged made no substantive change to American law, but Senator McCain's theatrics did stop Bill Frist from a series of legislative victories that might have made him a rival to the perceived McCain lead in the GOP nomination race.

The GOP Senate majority was lost, of course, and many believe the 55-45 solid majority was a victim of McCain's grandstanding throughout the second Bush term combined with the rise of the 527s that his vaunted anti-First Amendment law, McCain Feingold, birthed. Peter Keisler never got his committee vote, and still languishes in the Patrick Leahy controlled Judiciary Committee. The McCain-Feingold powered 527s continue to proliferate and distort the politics of the new century, and parts of the McCain masterpiece have been declared the obvious unconstitutional restraints on political speech that they are, but from Senator McCain we get zero remorse for this First Amendment fiasco.

There hasn't been much point in discussing this record while Senator McCain faded and saw his funds dip to almost nothing. But now he's back, the favorite of Independents in New Hampshire, and his pals in the MSM are trying to foist him again on the GOP. Romney's lead hasn't buckled in New Hampshire, and McCain's numbers haven't risen with GOP regulars for a very good reason --you don't get to lead the party you have consistently undercut for a decade.

So as attention turns to Christmas and then football and resolutions, we are exactly where the GOP always ends up: gathering behind the most conservative, electable Republican, who this year turns out to be Mitt Romney.