Attorney General Mark Shurtleff is paying the price for betting on the wrong horse. Shurtleff, who is on the verge of making a run against Sen. Bob Bennett this fall, endorsed John McCain for president over Utah near-deity Mitt Romney. Bob went with Mitt. McCain, of course, won the GOP nomination and cratered.

Payback time has come. Romney has endorsed Bennett and plans to energetically back the incumbent's re-election campaign. That might not mean much to the party's conservative hard-core that is fed up with Bennett's moderate ways, but "Mitt 4 Bob" billboards will have an enormous impact on Utah's popular vote. As BYU political scientist Quin Monson puts it:

After all, this is a guy that got 90 percent of the vote in the presidential primary in the state and raised unprecedented amounts of money from Republicans in Utah.