Things had been going well for our friend up north. Until a certain gentleman opened the door to his home and angrily announced his support for John McCain. He then told the legislator, “You’re a Communist!”

His reply: “How’d you know I was from Massachusetts?”

Dana Milbank looks for hugs outside a Pennsylvania McCain rally. He’s told, “You put your hands around me, you’ll spit your teeth out.”

The TV in the Dunkin’ Donuts next door is tuned to Fox News. Always. The cashiers selling cigarettes and lottery tickets are usually watching NESN, but for the caffeine-addled masses, it’s Fox and Friends or nothing. So, for one to five minutes every day, I get to see how the other half thinks. Or doesn’t think, as it were.

This morning, Fox had one of its several friends stationed on the Texas coastline. As he got rained on and splashed with tidewater and blown all over the place by Ike, he delivered his thoughts (there’s that word again) on, naturally enough, Sarah Palin’s performance with Charlie Gibson. The dude in raingear teetered on his feet and denounced the media’s ravenous hunger for trapping the greatest VP candidate ever in “Gotcha moments.”

Ah. Yes. Sarah Palin believes in urban murder but not in evolution. Ha ha ha ha GOTCHA!

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney didn’t get a ton of national play during this past week’s exercise in Republican media baiting democracy, mostly because his teenage sons have, thus far, avoided becoming impregnated by finger-tatted hockey players. But that doesn’t mean the state’s onetime one-term chief executive wasn’t making moves in Minneapolis. Aside from decrying “eastern elites,” “radical violent Islam,” porno, unions, promiscuity, government, liberals, liberals serving their government, Al Gore and/or air travel, China (and, we think, capitalism?), and newspapers and the lying liars who write them, Romney was busy laying the groundwork for a second, assumedly less-disastrous, run at the White House.

Assuming that hectoring the nation about taxes and Paris Hilton proves insufficient, and assuming that John McCain follows other people’s worst instincts into horrible, ass-freckly defeat, the Republicans will need somebody to swoop in in 2012 and stop surrendering to terror already. By all indications, that person will be Romney. The National Journal polled a number of party insiders this week, and a full 55 percent believe that, in 2012, Romney will be hitting Jack Abramoff’s leftovers as the GOP’s standard bearer. He blew everybody else away – placing a distant second to Romney, and pulling 15 percent to his 55, was “Nobody.” (A delightful prospect, to be sure.) Jeb Bush trailed “Nobody” by seven full points.

Romney’s already talking the part, assailing the government that, for all practical purposes, his own party controls. “We need change all right,” he thundered Wednesday night, “change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington – throw out big government liberals and elect John McCain.” These days, nothing says “ready for primetime” like the ability to whip up stinging feelings of victimhood in the poor, abused majority without betraying a shred of irony.

Locally, Romney’s tenure in the State House generated near-universal derision for its ruthless, naked, utterly transparent ambition. And it looks like that ambition just might pay off. The guy has money and has built a national organization. He spent the week shoring up the latter, holding daily receptions with supporters.

Safe to say that Jane Swift wasn’t first in line to mingle with Mitt. State House News reported that the former governor, whom Romney elbowed out of the Corner Office in 2002, skipped her successor’s big speech. “I was unfortunately doing another press interview,” she confessed, adding “I’m sure he did a great job.” So irony’s not dead after all!

Speaking of Swift, John McCain’s vice presidential pick, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, has begun attracting comparisons to the high-flying former acting governor. For those of you reading this from the great frozen north, that’s not a good thing.

The Hill and the Hall spied Brad Jones on CNN during Palin’s speech the other night. He appeared to be listening intently, and was not wearing a cowboy hat. Well done on both counts, sir.

Move over, Cinco DiMasi: Tim Murray will lead a trade mission to Ireland next month. One can only imagine the intense, uh, preparation that goes into a trip like that.

The Boston Public Health Commission’s efforts to ban restaurant patio smoking should generate significant public outcry, but it’s another of the commission’s proposed regulations – the one that would bar pharmacies from selling cigarettes – that is sure to get the city’s political class talking.

While researching his Power profile, we were told by one mayor observer that the unrestrained vehemence he exhibited towards CVS’s in-store clinics (they “seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene,” take advantage of poor sick people in a way that’s “wrong,” and “jeopardize” public safety, Hizzoner said) didn’t just have its roots in the mayor’s fierce allegiance to Boston’s community health centers. It also stemmed, we heard, from a decades-old grudge the mayor nurses against CVS – one that dates to his days as a lowly city councilor.

So is it possible that, having lost the battle to derail the pharmacy’s clinics, City Hall turns around and decides to take a significant chunk out of the store’s bottom line? It certainly puts the explanation in yesterday’s Globe – “Why, in a place where people go to get healthy and get information about staying healthy, would you want to sell something that has absolutely no redeeming value and ends up killing a lot of people?” – in a different light.

(The Hill and the Hall had a dentist appointment this morning, and thus we didn’t get around to calling City Hall for comment on this one. But we’re sure they’d issue a Complete Categorical Denial of everything we just said. So just go ahead and throw one of those at the end of this whole thing.)

News from the suburbs: Somerville isn’t the only city whose residents are being asked to vote in a prospective State Rep specifically because of how little pull that Rep will have with legislative leadership. Framingham’s in on the act, too! At a forum this week, the town’s incumbent Rep, Pam Richardson, came under fire for staying on Speaker Sal DiMasi’s good side. “I’m not counting on Sal DiMasi looking out for Framingham’s best interest,” one of Richardson’s opponents blasted. Future back-benchers of the world, unite! (Unite, that is, in the cause of not getting any earmarks passed ever.)

Wire services flew to Minneapolis to contribute to this report.

[RNC poto]

John McCain’s “people” are hurting this morning. Their ex-BFF has dumped them – reporters, the very caste that made him in the first place – for cynical rich white guys with white teeth and bad haircuts. Thanks to these dudes, from here on out, the things McCain will be saying will either be mostly full of shit or completely and totally full of shit, and, reporters being the nasty trolls that we are, will take great pleasure in pointing those facts out. At the same time, his campaign is dangerously close to folding under the weight of its own mavericky ineptitude.

What to do? Bury the messenger. Hell, it worked before. And most of the country thinks what we do is make-believe, anyway.

And thus, last night we learned, via fire-breathing faux-populist speechifying, that newspaper-reading (gasp!) Washington elites (temporarily relocated to LA, apparently) have come to destroy the greatest VP pick ever, and her cute little daughter, too. They’re afraid that John McCain and Sarah Palin are just too dangerous to the capital’s power structure.

And by Washington elites, we don’t mean the GOP, which controlled Congress forever, has used its eight-year death-grip on the White House to bloat the executive branch’s reach and power, and owns the Supreme Court to boot. We mean those other Washington elites. The bad ones!

[Earlier: McCain Hops off the Bus]

Chris Jones’s portrait of John McCain in September’s Esquire [not online at the moment finally gracing the internet with its presence] is noteworthy because of how drastically it differs from the scene Ryan Lizza painted back in February.

In one, McCain crawls back from oblivion by inviting reporters to crowd around his table, ten at a time, for the purposes of watching him eat donuts and bust his staffers’ balls while indulging in “long stretches of banter” – unscripted, of course – “punctuated by short, intense discussions of politics and policy.”

And then, having ridden this free-wheeling, back-slapping model to the nomination, he withdraws. He gets nasty, bitter, impatient, and mind-numbingly scripted. He refrains from cursing and telling dirty jokes. He worries about what to do with his hands. He fights himself and his handlers. “His first instinct was still to go with his gut, but his gut was sometimes a contradictory and unpredictable thing, and people with white teeth whispered into his ear time and again that he needed to curb his impulsiveness.”

I’m reminded of an interview I did with Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi back in 2005. He was hawking his book, Spanking the Donkey, and explaining why he was swearing off ever covering another presidential election: Because both parties, and the insipid campaign managers who populate them, would rather offer the electorate a pair of empty suits than have to manage a candidate capable of emoting and speaking candidly without prior authorization.

“The campaign,” he said, “is set up in a way that precludes spontaneity, not only on the part of the candidates, but on the part of everybody that’s involved in it – the candidates’ aides, the reporters following them around. Everybody’s locked in this bubble, and everybody’s totally paranoid.”

And so McCain, having long ago gutted Mitt Romney, is told he must now become Mitt Romney. It’s for the sake of the Party. There is no other way.

[New Yorker image]

Except that, apparently, Frye only ran for governor to get back at the sitting governor, who had found his way into Frye’s wife’s pants.

Pressed about his candidacy, Frye told Rob Corddry (new Meet the Press host, anyone?), “I’m not qualified to run our great state, or have any hopes whatsoever of winning an election.” And that, apparently, is good enough for the Mac.

There’s got to be a local tie-in here. And here it is. Former Brighton State Rep. Brian Golden also made Mac’s list. Golden was a good Democrat – he campaigned for George W. Bush twice, and was rewarded for his independent-mindedness with a patronage job inside the Romney administration. John Walsh has got to be heartbroken about losing this guy.

Mildly related: More than half of Mass voters want John Kerry off the mainland – for good. According to Suffolk’s almost-omnicient pollster, only 38% want to return Johnny Loser to Washington. That’s great news for Ed O’Reilly, he of the hopeless, class-warring, faux-progressive vanity campaign for Senate. Less so for whoever ran Jim Ogonowski’s hapless signature-gathering effort.

This is the same man, of course, who helped label a triple amputee as soft on defense, and who orchestrated a whisper campaign that a judge’s concern for abused children stemmed from the fact that he was secretly a pedophile. And hey, didn’t John McCain sire a black baby or something?

What a difference two years out of power makes.

Related: If Ryan Lizza’s recent piece on the inner workings of John McCain’s Straight Talk Express doesn’t make you wish you were sitting on that horseshoe couch right now, you’re probably an accountant. Ink-stained wretches everywhere dream about having that kind of freewheeling access. It makes our jobs easier, and as Liza shows, when our jobs are easier, everybody – us, the people we cover, and the people who have to read our copy – wind up better off.

It also makes me feel really, really bad for the poor bastards who were stuck following Mitt Romney around for months on end.

And for all the endless kvetching about the whole thing, this is the paper’s most emailed story right now. Sexy Johnny hasn’t even cracked the top ten.