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No, it is my opinion that we ended up with McCain because conservatives were never able to recruit and run a conservative that everybody would support. Most of the conservatives running turned out to be boring so nobody would give them the time of day since they couldn’t win (like Duncan Hunter), and everybody chose a different candidate and then trash-talked all the others.

Remember Tancredo, Brownback, Gilmore? All could be considered conservative candidates of differing types, all were in the race, and none gained any traction.

And when we weren’t all clinging to our preferred candidate, we were all pining for someone new to get into the race, mostly Fred Thompson although there were those wistfully talking of others, including Alan Keyes.

I was one of those pushing for Thompson. And when he got in, he got trashed as well, although he also in my opinion turned out to be not a very good campaigner, and was just too late to get traction.

Meanwhile, McCain’s poll numbers had fallen through a hole, and he was written off. But (or maybe because of that), he was able to win in New Hampshire and get the “comeback” meme. Heck, some freepers actually supported him in New Hampshire, because they wanted to stop Romney and assumed McCain was still a dead candidate.

By the time it was clear McCain had the momentum, the only candidates left were Giuliani, Huckabee, and Romney. You know who I picked of those three. Rush was actually pushing Giuliani and Romney, anything to stop McCain. Other talk show hosts were pushing Romney, or Huckabee, again mostly because anything was better than McCain.

I do understand that others have a different opinion of how we ended up where we did. Heck, in part our problem was we never had a good, well-liked, truly conservative candidate to rally around. That’s why conservative polling kept splitting the vote between Thompson, Huckabee, and Romney, with conservatives in each camp spending most of their time telling the others all the bad things that made the other candidates unacceptable.

I see that happening in this election, only the “McCain” of this one could end up being Romney. We’ve got at least two candidates in the wings that are being promoted, Perry and Palin. We’ve got several conservatives in the race, in my opinion better than the conservative choices in 2008; they each have supporters, but are also taking big hits here by people supporting other candidates, or other unannounced candidates.

I don’t think it’s too late yet. Also, I’m not saying Free Republic is the best barometer for conservative opinion when it comes to these major elections. But I’ll feel a lot better if, by september, there’s a candidate IN the race who gets mostly positive comments here. If we haven’t coalesced around a candidate (or candidates, if they are both acceptable), I think it’s going to get rough.

Romney has no real shot at the nomination. He was a tough call in 2008 when his campaign platform was almost pure conservative (even if he wasn’t), and he didn’t have Obamacare hanging around his neck, and wasn’t pandering to the left-wing of the republican party with comments like his stupid “I can work with Democrats” meme. Like I said, he’s looking like the McCain of 2012.

But he has a 50-state campaign organization, and a ton of money, and lots of friends who will give him a ton more money. He’s got the ‘next in line’ thing, and the establishment “we trust him more than those tea-party types” vote. None of those groups can win the majority; but remember McCain took over the nomination process while winning 30-40% of the votes. He didn’t start breaking 50% until he was the de-facto winner.

I see done to Michelle what I saw done to Romney 4 years ago. But Michelle isn’t a former supporter of abortion who gave money to Planned Parenthood and buddied up with Ted Kennedy. She didn’t just come around to her conservative positions in the last decade.

I’m not a fan of Michelle. I see her errors as a big deal, because as a conservative the media will pounce on every minor mistake she makes, and she seems to make a lot of minor mistakes. I’d support Palin over Bachmann, if I had the choice.

But Bachmann is in this race to win it, and it bothers me to see her torn down so, by the same folks who praised her as the tea party advocate in congress (she did give the “tea party” response to the SOTU, after all, and I remember people here defending her strongly against the attacks that she was stepping on the GOP response).