It comes today from the editors of National Review:
"McCain’s supporters are telling one another that his victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina prove that he can ignore and isolate conservative opinion leaders such as Rush Limbaugh. That’s what they said when he won primaries in 2000, too, and McCain paid dearly for listening to them. Our guess is that the voters who are leaving Huckabee and Thompson will go disproportionately to Romney. McCain has yet to win a plurality of self-identified conservatives anywhere. McCain will never win over all conservatives, even if he gets the nomination. But he can reassure conservatives if he pledges to name a conservative running mate and identifies respected conservative legal figures to whom he will turn when nominating judges. He can promise to approach immigration reform piecemeal rather than comprehensively. He should say that strong evidence that the illegal-immigrant population is shrinking will have to arrive before he legalizes any large segment of that population. And he can acknowledge that scientific advances have weakened the case for federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research."
Fundamental: McCain cannot, in my view, win the GOP nomination without conservative support. Nor can he win the fall election without it. To get conservative support (and doesn't he still claim to be, while a maverick, still part of the conservative movement?) he's got to run like a conservative and BE a conservative. Will he?
