The Voters' Revenge

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II. The Republicans
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney's plans to shortcut the Republican nomination were based on hard cash, not heartstrings. Instead of challenging his party's old notions, he conformed to them as closely as a loaf of bread conforms to its pan. But he learned in these tumultuous five days that democracy is more than weighing wallets and poll-testing positions, no matter what your consultants might tell you.

Whipped in Iowa by Huckabee — a former Baptist minister with a parson's demeanor and a cobra's bite — Romney foundered in New Hampshire on a block of granite named McCain. When the Associated Press called the New Hampshire race shortly after the polls closed, McCain's volunteers screamed for joy, but the candidate's mood was more muted. McCain had spent the previous 24 hours superstitiously re-creating the trappings of his smashing New Hampshire win eight years ago — sleeping in the same hotel room, wearing the same emerald green sweater and so on. "I guess more nostalgia, you know," he reflected later. "We all know that I would never do this again."

How had the 71-year-old Arizona Senator managed it this time? His story, too, involved catastrophe and reinvention — and voters responding to a personal message from a candidate and a campaign that wouldn't give in.

He entered the campaign a year ago as the apparent front runner, an awkward role for a free-ranging, fence-jumping, kick-the-corral maverick. McCain never got the hang of it, breaking with his party's mainstream on tax cuts, immigration, harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects — the list goes on. By July his bank account and his poll numbers were in a race to zero, which turned out to be a blessing.

"The people who mishandled his campaign did him an enormous favor. They blew up a campaign that couldn't win," says an unaffiliated Republican strategist. "They destroyed his bases and mangled his supply lines. They left him only the option of falling back on himself and his instincts to fight a guerrilla-style campaign. And that's the only way he can win." Troops decimated, supply lines smoldering, McCain returned to the campaigning he knows and loves best. "He put this campaign on his back," says Mark Salter, McCain's close aide, co-author and comrade through long hours spent lying in ambush. "He went out there and worked. Obama gets massive rallies, but McCain just wins them one guy at a time."

Returning to the turf where he scalped George W. Bush in 2000, McCain revved up the Straight Talk Express and rode it to more than 100 town-hall meetings. Romney barely knew what hit him. McCain's numbers shot up in the last week before the primary. Says Bernie Streeter, a former mayor of Nashua: "Voters realized that the guy they loved eight years ago was back in the horse race."

"I think principle and persuasion won over money and political messaging," McCain told TIME after his victory.