Candidate Crush Confidential - NYTimes.com I have to confess I have spent the last nine months having a series of crushes on absolutely the wrong people - hypocrites, philanderers, zealots. The more inappropriate their behavior, the more I would swoon. Sure, it felt funny to say "you go, girl" when Michele Bachmann announced that she'd heard that the anti-HPV vaccination causes mental retardation. I tried to explain to my friends that Newt's colony on the moon would make our country great again, bring down gas prices, or cure unemployment (surely a few of those nine-year-old janitors could get hired up there someday). As each candidate dropped by the wayside, I would flit capriciously to the next, hoping that this would be "the one," a relationship that could flourish on its own terms and not be turned into roadkill by the Romney money machine. My first campaign crush was Michele Bachmann, winner of the Iowa straw poll so very long ago. She said she shared the same hometown with John Wayne, mistaking him for John Wayne Gacy Jr, the pedophile mass murderer. She saluted the Founding Fathers for "working tirelessly" to end slavery. God told her to be a tax lawyer for the I.R.S., one of the oddest deific decrees on record. She declared that "Americans are tired of seeing Congress spend their hard-earned tax dollars as though it were Monopoly money," but presumably her husband got genuine federal greenbacks for his moral counseling business, which appears to be mainly preoccupied with curing gayness. Unmoored from facts, history or logic, Michele Bachmann was my dream girl. She was fun; she was dangerous; she was everything my parents had warned me against. I had hoped she would rescue the Republicans from Mitt, but it was not to be. Once Michele ended it, I made a quick rebound to Rick Perry. I know you're not supposed to do that, but Perry was an Aggie yell leader, a Texas Governor, a prodigious death warrant signer. Who was it in my past that he reminded me of? Of course, it was 2000 all over again, but without all that "compassionate conservative" sweet talk. Then Perry started letting it rip. He made Bachmann sound like Hannah Arendt. He declared Turkey an Islamic terrorist state. He was going to cut three agencies, but he could only remember 1, maybe 2. He thought the voting age was 21 and that the election was held on a Wednesday. Rick made fun of himself and I hoped the Republicans would be good sports, but they weren't. If only he had just stood there combing his hair, like Elvis. My next unlikely crush was on Herman Cain. We need not linger. Remember the 9-9-9 plan. You had to love its elegant simplemindedness. The other voters did too and for a few weeks, Herman surged to the front. Cain was proudly ignorant of who might be the leader of (our strategic ally in the Afghan campaign, but never mind) Uz-bekee-bekee-stan-stan. But a crazy plan and a willful indifference to world politics didn't do him in. It was a string of groped women that kept on growing; whether the number of women made it up to to his talismanic nine, we will never know. The ranks were thinning. Ron Paul scared me; I was looking for adventure, but going back to the gold standard was a little rich for my blood. Jon Huntsman tried to appeal to my intelligence. He never spoke to me, in Chinese or otherwise. If Jon Huntsman were the answer, then why not just go all the way to making your parents happy with Mitt Romney. Suddenly, the libidinous, hypocritical grandiosity of Newt Gingrich started to look pretty interesting. Left wife number one when she got cancer. Left wife number two when she got MS. Asked for an open marriage. Didn't get it. Willing to spend heavily at Tiffany's for wife number three. Became a Catholic and a champion of family values. Got testy when anyone asked him about whether there might be an issue there. Perfect. Newt was inevitable; he said so himself. I kept hoping that after South Carolina, Newt would trim his sails, keep quiet and behave like a normal person for just a few weeks. But flush with success, Newt had to be Newt. He wanted that colony on the moon, but no one knew why. He looked forward to a series of marathon Lincoln-Douglas-style debates with President Obama. So did I. It was not to be. His campaign ended with a whimper, with Gingrich bitten by a penguin in the zoo and inundated by campaign debts. Finally, I turned my lonely eyes to the little engine that could, Rick Santorum, the world's happiest medieval man. Sweater vests have never been sexy, true, but fashion is fickle. I used to get a bit misty-eyed about his obstinate, quixotic belief that deeply held principles, like opposing contraception, can defeat a mountain of money, a near-unanimous Republican establishment and eight years of organizational infrastructure. You have to love the dreamers, but it never works out. Five head-over-heels flings in less than a year. Looking back, do I feel that I exercised poor judgment? I suppose. Should it have been obvious that none of these people was appropriate? Did my friends all warn me? They did. Now that it is time to get back to my real life, I ask myself, was it all worth it? You betcha. Eric Lewis is a partner at Lewis Baach PLLC in Washington.