John McCain’s campaign had been dead for five months.

Hillary Clinton’s for five days.

But the frontrunners we started this campaign with a year ago have both regained a real shot at their parties’ nominations.

Who’da thunk it?!?

McCain
The Arizona senator’s Phoenix act, though more easily foreseen going into today’s contest, is in many ways the less probable. I was among the media masses penning McCain’s political obituary after he burned through $30 million and left himself less cash than Ron Paul (pre Guy Fawkes day, no less).

Give Mac credit for perseverance — and the insight to understand that all the money in the world couldn’t solve the electability problems of RuPaul Rompson.

Despite McCain’s convincing New Hampshire victory — which importantly included a victory over Mitt Romney among Republicans as well as independents — I’m not entirely clear that McCain is now the GOP frontrunner.

Huckabee’s going to cruise to an easy victory in South Carolina. That’s a done deal. Which leaves McCain and Romney again to do battle in Michigan. Romney’s still got deeper pockets and a deep family connection to the state where his dad was a popular governor.

Romney’s also plastic enough and smart enough to end the negative campaigning that hurt him so much in the Granite State and give the voters of Michigan a neatly packaged version of whatever it is they want to buy.

But if McCain can thread the Michigan needle, I think he’ll have truly boxed out Rudy as the neocon maverick, and set up Florida and beyond as a battle royale between the Huck and the Mac. (A Romney comeback in Michigan, however, creates space for Rudy and we’re back to the clusterf&%k for the White House.)

Clinton

Hats off to Hillary. Her Lazarus act was as unforeseeable as it was jaw dropping. Even her internal polls, apparently, had her down 11 going into voting today. I still haven’t seen the data that explain what the hell turned that around for her.

From my vantage point, Obama did nothing wrong. He played the gracious handsome frontrunner to a T. He looked and sounded like a melange of Kennedy and Dr. King. Even his concession speech tonight was brilliant. There was no Dean scream. He didn’t even rise to the bait as Team Clinton’s attacked his “false hopes” and “fairy tale” campaign. You can argue in retrospect that he badly misplayed the expectations game, but as movement candidate reaching for the Big Mo, you can’t fault him for trumpeting his tidal wave.

Obama did his job. Clinton just pulled a rabbit out of her hat.

Clearly, her victory came with the support of her sisters in arms. Fifty seven percent of the New Hampshire Democratic electorate were women and they gave her a nine point edge. That’s pretty much the ballgame.

Obama romped with the under 25 crowd, who again showed up. And he won with independents, as expected.

Did too many of them think the Democratic race was in the bag — a 13 point spread in the polls will do that to a voter — and defect to the McCain/Romney matchup?

Or was it that independent women boycotted the GOP’s warmongers’ penis party and cast their lot with Hillary?

Or maybe it was the quiet racism of the Bradley effect.

Who knows?!?!

There’s a mystery here that still begs explanation. What’s terribly clear tonight, however, is that Democrats now have a world-class race on their hands — which is probably good for the eventual nominee, and the party.

There will be a giga-ton of organizing going on nationwide between now and February fifth, to boost turnout, goose the youth vote, and bring new people into the process. The much discussed “enthusiasm gap” between Democrats and Republicans seems destined to grow.

And this race isn’t likely — or is at least less likely — to devolve into nasty mudfight, now that Clinton will no longer be tempted/forced to resort to desperate measures in the next weeks just to stay alive.

As a fan of politics as sport I feel like we all just witnessed something remarkable tonight. Doug Flutie’s hail mary comes to mind. And I think New Hampshire did progressives a tremendous favor by insisting Obama’s path to the nomination be something other than a cakewalk.

The competition is already making each of these candidates into stronger politicians. The Tin Woman showed us her heart yesterday — Terry McAuliffe called it “the humanizing moment” — and today says she “found her voice.” (Leave be notions tonight that a 60 year old woman should have found her voice a couple decades ago — she did win, after all.)

Obama is going to have to dig deep — and perhaps show us a little earthiness to match his ethereal oratory.

On to Nevada! May the best candidate win.

A Newsweek Iowa poll shows Huckabee kicking Romney’s rump:

The ordained Southern Baptist minister now leads Romney by a two-to-one margin, 39 percent to 17 percent, among likely GOP caucus-goers.

So much for the power of advertising…. Romney’s been blanketing Iowa’s airwaves (and presumably New Hampshire and South Carolina, too). According to this Boston Globe graph, Huckabee has yet to air a paid ad.

The other man from Hope is now tied with Giuiliani nationally.

I’m not sure what’s more remarkable: Rudy’s freefall. Huck’s rocket-ride to the top. Or the fact that McCain is now only 4 points off the pace.

I’ve been catching up on the GOP debate. Thank God for TiVo. After a half dozen of these, I just can’t stomach any more of the Tancredo, Hunter, Brownback triumverate. *Bub-boop!*

Tonight, of course, marked the first debate for Fred Thompson. He fit right in. Which is hardly a complement. He was shaky with his talking points — visibly straining to remember the script about “Islamic fascism”. He looked vaguely dyspeptic when he was speaking, and more or less catatonic when it wasn’t his turn. The top lighting gave the bags under his eyes an uncanny resemblance to steamer trunks. He looked older than McCain if you can imagine that.

His height helps him — is he really Yao-Ming sized or are the rest of these guys midgets? And the easy folksiness of lines like “we’re eating our seed corn” in his answer on the future of Medicare and Social Security probably plays with a certain kind of Bush voter.

When it comes down to it, these debates are all about gotcha moments — think: Rudy dressing down Ron Paul earlier in the season — video nuggets that get amplified and replayed in the mainstream media. Fred didn’t have any of those moments, good or bad. So his debut was probably ‘good enough’ in his pursuit of government work.

Mitt Romney seemed a changed man tonight. Perhaps it was the CNBC/WallStreetJournal sponsorship of the debate, but he projected himself as a zealous, sunny business wonk. He looked sharp and tan and was unusually un-scary about Iran. It seemed clear he’d rather talk than fight with Tehran — as opposed to Rudy whose unbridled enthusiasm for the “military option” made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

I get the feeling that if you peel back the oniony layers of opportunism, this is actually who Mitt Romney is. A northern Republican with a hard on for capital gains. And if you’re a Democrat rooting for the least-worst option to emerge from the Republican field, Romney may just be your guy. (more…)

…who had a gay-pride problem with the GOP Base.

The Note unearths this Mitt Romney flier from 2002:

Which seems fairly tame (if flaming pink) in comparison to Rudy’s repeated celebration of the Stonewall Rebellion, and hosting of Pride events at Gracie Mansion.

Most difficult for Rudy to squirm away from, however, will be this 2002 letter in which he frames the Stonewall riots as a “triumph” in the “struggle for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Civil Rights.” [Emphasis added.]

I would love to believe that base Republicans would vote for a man who calls gay rights ‘civil rights’ but something tells me that just won’t fly in South Carolina.

Now if only Fred Thompson went to church…

(Via The Swamp):

“YouTube is a website that allows kids to network with one another and make friends and contact each other. YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000.” —Mitt Romney

Um, Mitt, that’s MySpace, where you, Mitt Romney — quite coincidentally, we’re sure — have 29,000 friends.

When it rains it pours.

The co-chair of John McCain’s Florida campaign on Wednesday was “arrested for soliciting a male undercover police officer for sex in a Titusville park restroom….

Allen was considered to be acting suspicious by police as he entered and exited the men’s room three times, according to a Titusville Police report. Moments later, he approached the plainclothes officer and offered to perform oral sex for $20, police said.

Boy. Those “gay sweaters” McCain has been complaining about must have powers beyond even Tinky Winky’s imagining.

Let me get this straight:

Rudy’s top advisers are into coke, hookers, race baiting and flattening Persia.

John McCain has less money than Ron Paul and just fired (as in axed) his campaign’s top guns, leaving him essentially dead in the water.

Fred Thompson, the supposed Christianist savior, was by all indications a lobbyist for an abortion group in the ’90s, and a mole for Nixon during Watergate.

And Mitt Romney has become such a poster child for inconstancy, that he gets ribbed for it on SportsCenter.

I just don’t see it: How does any of these jokers get nominated?

My money’s on Mitt right now. Especially now that McCain’s search-and-destroy oppo-research master Terry Nelson has left the building.

Am I wrong?