“If a man can’t even win his own party, it’s not likely he can win the country.”
Somebody needs to tell McCain about this.
McCain did win his party, and in some ways more impressively than most past nominees — every past nominee since 1964 has been the clear favorite all-along, whereas he fought back from polling in the single digits, to say the least of a fourth-place finish in Iowa.
And, in terms of ideological choices, three of the four substantial candidates he beat (Romney, Huckabee, or Giuliani) were plainly more liberal than he (by record if not by platform in the case of Romney). Only Fred Thompson was identifiably more conservative, and he couldn’t carry even the one, staunchly conservative, state he seriously contested.