Here's Johnny

It seems the McCain campaign in New Hampshire is circulating a Union Leader article on the Senator's recent gains in the state.

So what's the reason behind McCain's recent success? Well, much of it is due to Mitt Romney's recent downticks in New Hampshire polls from higher positions he held earlier this summer. Some of Romney's old supporters have moved over to Giuliani, but more voters seem to be heading back to McCain.

New Hampshire Republican primary voters (unlike their Democratic counterparts) will vote for the candidate they think is the "true conservative" in the pack. Even if Romney has the organization and money to beat out his Democratic competition in a national election, it seems Granite Staters are beginning to realize Romney may not be as solid a conservative candidate as they thought. Took them long enough....

Funny that so many articles predicted a McCain dropout after the release of Q2 fundraising figures and staff abandonments (One, Two, Three) when in fact McCain was subtly reinventing his campaign and recharging his fiery personality for an autumn surge.

And it isn't even all about the polls. The fact that McCain has bounced back from national numbers in the single digits only two months ago to nearly twenty percent now is less important than the fact that people are no longer using his name as the punch-line of jokes.

As GOP "savior" Fred Thompson seems all but dead after falling from grace with his campaign's botched launch, McCain's biggest fall was out of the sky over Vietnam forty years ago. That sure didn't stop him, did it?

I can't say I didn't see it coming.

(photo credit: © 2007 by Luke N. Vargas. All Rights Reserved.)