In October, everybody seemed to be doing it — getting into the campaign in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, that is. It was a three-way race among Republican Deirdre Scozzafava, Democrat Bill Owens, and Conservative Doug Hoffman to fill the seat that had been left vacant when President Obama tapped Republican John McHugh as secretary of the Army. Endorsements became such a popular sport for out-of-state Republicans that the special election came to seem a litmus test for conservatives looking at the 2012 presidential race.     

If it was, Newt Gingrich didn’t come off well among conservatives. Perhaps the biggest news was when the former Speaker of the House endorsed the Republican candidate. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound like news. But Scozzafava is a Republican who supported President Obama’s stimulus package and who won the support of NARAL Pro-Choice America in the NY-23 race. When she announced on Halloween that she was suspending her campaign, and then went on to endorse the Democrat, Owens, Gingrich declared himself “deeply disappointed.”

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Among other prominent Republicans, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty was caught off guard during a Washington, D.C., fundraiser, but once alerted to this race he quickly endorsed Hoffman and has been talking about him ever since (and has been subsequently pressed on what being a Republican means). And Sarah Palin Facebooked her enthusiastic endorsement of the same. Mike Huckabee showed up to deliver a paid speech at a New York Conservative party dinner but did not actually endorse Hoffman — that is, until Scozzafava withdrew. He’s been Tweeting for Hoffman ever since.

But notably missing from the endorsement mix was former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

Less than a week before election day, while campaigning for the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, Romney announced: “I have chosen not to endorse the Republican in the 23,” indicating that he thought that sent a message in and of itself.

His spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom elucidated: “Mitt Romney is a Republican and he tends to support the Republican candidate in races — and when he can’t, because there are too many differences on the issues, he stays out of the race altogether, and that’s the course he’s following in the New York special election. He doesn’t plan to make any endorsement at all.”

By not endorsing anyone in NY-23, the once and presumably future Republican presidential hopeful avoided the Gingrich problem — endorsing the Republican-who-could-comfortably-endorse-a-Democrat (and would!) — while avoiding the problem of opposing the candidate put forth by the party he would probably be approaching before long to support his own candidacy.

One could argue that Romney did what you would expect the establishment Republican candidate to do — and this suggests a different Romney from the one who ran in the 2008 primaries.  

It looked for a while in late October as if everyone who wanted to prove his or her conservative bona fides was talking about Hoffman. Romney could have very easily joined in — in a press release, in a Fox News appearance, even on National Review Online. But Romney didn’t really see a way he could be constructive in the race. Palin’s “Hoffman, Baby, Hoffman” wouldn’t have come naturally to Romney. And could you really see Romney teaming up with country singer John Rich to kick off a Hoffman rally, the way Fred Thompson did? Self-aware, Romney couldn’t see it either. And so he declined to play any prominent role — although NRO has learned that since Scozzafava officially exited the race, the Romney camp has reached out and provided help to Hoffman.