The Romney Death Watch at NRO

K-Lo, vascillating between the stages of denial, anger, bargaining,depression and acceptance:

Bargaining:

He's going to have a real hard time ever breaking away from that, at least in the short term, if Fred Thompson gets in. And the short term matters because if Thompson's rallying people and taking big donors (and little ones who are withholding at the moment), will Q2 look as good for Romney as Q1? Maybe money-wise ...but with the conservative grassroots he wants to energize? Fred moves in on them if he gets in.

So as a Romney fan, I continue to casually float an early Thompson-Romney ticket.

Sure, sure. A lying flip-flopping Jed Clampett is a regular magnet to voters.

Bargaining:

Romney as veep? That may be what's in the cards for 08 if Fred Thompson gets in and takes off — and wouldn't be a bad ticket.

Depression and back to denial:

You'd be amazed how many people who don't work for the Romney campaign have said to me some variation on "national polls mean nothing this far out" today. There's some wisdom to this.

Anger:

I'm old enough to remember Fred Thompson on the Watergate committee. He
was the one who first questioned Alexander Butterfield about the
existence of a taping system in Nixon's Oval Office. After that, the
rest was history.
Thompson also smoked a pipe during the hearings. Bet the anti-smoking
Nazis will resurrect pictures of THAT.

I imagine all hell will break loose when prolifers find out Thompson smokes a pipe. 

Acceptance:

Mark Levin writes: "The funny thing about the current crop of GOP presidential contenders is that they all claim to be conservative, they have some conservatives who claim they're conservative, but they're not really all that conservative — are they?"

I think this is one of the things that people are finding attractive about Fred Thompson — he sounds conservative, like a movement kinda guy.

This is what people found so attractive about Jeb Bush at that National Review Institute Conservative Summit back in January. He was able to talk in front of a group of conservatives as, authentically, one of us, with a clear recorded history as one.

Meanwhile, Eyeon08 has a rundown of the latest poll numbers.  The more people know about Romney, the more his unfavorable numbers rise.

The more pathetic it gets inside the Romney camp.

Even if the hunter's find Romney's story deceptive, Ellie Mae and Jethro believe.