Predictable day-after spin from Team Sweater Vest, reminiscent of Kevin Kline talking about Vietnam at the end of “A Fish Called Wanda.” Just one teensy caveat:

They’re right.

The NBC News Elections Desk reports that in the Michigan primary, with 30 delegates at stake, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney will split that state’s delegates 15 apiece.

Michigan allocated its delegates winner-take-all by congressional district.

Well, no, they’re not really right. They tied in delegates but Santorum doesn’t care about that; the goal in Michigan was to shatter Romney’s status as presumptive nominee by shocking him on his home field. It was all about narrative: Romney can’t win in the midwest, in a state where his family has a huge brand, even when he outspends his opponent two to one. Time to appoint a new general to lead the battle against Obama in the fall. Instead, not only did Mitt pull it off, he topped his vote total from four years ago. And more than that, he did it by winning with the right groups. I’m sympathetic to Erick Erickson’s post this morning arguing that a narrow win at home despite a huge spending advantage doesn’t bode well for November, but the narrowness of that win is distorted by the fact that so many Democrats turned out for Santorum. It was Romney, not RS, who won handily among Republicans, 47/37; in a closed primary, without those votes that Santorum got from people who’ll likely be backing Obama in the fall, Mitt would have won in a rout. Read John Podhoretz’s op-ed in today’s Post for further thoughts on that. Conservative activists who know Romney’s record inside and out may hate and/or mistrust him, but the GOP rank-and-file that doesn’t follow politics day to day likes him well enough. They want to beat O and Mitt can plausibly claim that over the course of a long campaign he’s best positioned to make that happen. Although, to bring this point full circle, that phenomenon poses a risk in the general election identified by Erickson: If you have an incumbent whom most people personally like pitted against a guy lacking charm and a compelling campaign message beyond “electability,” who are the low-information rank-and-file in the broader electorate more likely to vote for?

Two clips you for here. One is a new ad from Team Romney touting the mischievous Democratic support for Santorum in last night’s vote. That’s a smart thing to needle him for, not so much because people think RS is a left-wing dupe or that it’s horribly transgressive to make robocalls to Democratic voters but because the contrast blunts Santorum’s attacks on Mitt for being a “Massachusetts liberal.” Expect to see more of this. The other clip, via Mediaite, is of Krauthammer blaming Santorum’s loss on “Kennedy, college, and contraception.” I wondered too yesterday whether his bashing of JFK’s church-and-state speech might have contributed to his loss among Catholics, but it’s hard to believe that Catholic affection for Kennedy is still so profound that an election today might turn on it. Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly asks a good question: Did RS “lose” the Catholic vote last night or is it more the case that he never really had it?