Bingo! That is the money-quote.
And that’s what this is all really about. The Vetting of his eligibility should have been done prior to the Democratic Primary, and the fact that it was not, left everyone in an awkward position.
Indeed; after his selection in the Democrat primary, to fail to support him would be to fail to support the Democrat party. Moreover, to investigate his eligibility at that point would be to undermine the Party's leadership and therefore its authority.
After Congress certified the votes of the electors, they were all party to putting him into power and guilty of negligence. (Add to this the things Congress has tried to do to nullify the NBC-clause without explicitly amending the Constitution and it becomes very easy to imagine conspiracy theories -- they did it with McCain and a 'resolution' considering him to be a Natural Born Citizen -- the two primary parties fielding candidates who were not certainly NBC-qualified, and now two who are certainly not NBC-qualified, makes it seem like they've pulled a Morton's Fork on us to establish "precedent".)
And so this is how it snowballed, each failure of a group with responsibility to act appropriately and responsibly increased the fallout from the problem until we arrived here with the political equivalent of Chernobyl.
Had we not selected McCain (who possessed his own eligibility problem politically) the issue would likely have been brought out more forcefully, but McCain saw only the damage it would cause him should the issue be brought up, and he didn’t consider it important anyway.
I don't agree; I think the parties fielded candidates of questionable qualifications precisely to set precedent for nullifying the NBC clause, and therefore the rest of the Constitution; after all, if the people-as-a-whole do not demand that it be followed then they can literally get away with anything. Case-in-point: TSA screenings, any other place/circumstance and the actions would be considered sexual assault and molestation (and are certainly violative of the 4th Amendment), yet they can do it because only a small group of people so much as squawk. The Republican establishment got behind him in lockstep and agreed to disparage anyone who dared bring the topic up. Bottom line, not too many people care about the enforcement of rules (Laws) they don’t like anyways.
I think this theory is too conspiracy minded. McCain was not selected by a Cabal, he was simply the least worst candidate after Fred Thompson waited too long (and then didn't try very hard) to get into the contest. All the other choices were even more crappy than McCain. (In my Opinion.) Not a one of them had a better chance than did John McCain, and it was for that reason he won the primaries until he was the nominee.
We ended up with McCain as a result of bad luck mostly. If you disagree, tell me which of the following would have been a better choice than John McCain.
Rudy Giuliani, Duncan Hunter, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Alan Keyes, John McCain, and Fred Thompson. As far as I was concerned, it was Fred Thompson and the Seven Dwarves, with Grumpy being the least worst among the Dwarves.
I have yet to hear anyone tell me which of the candidates we had to chose from (other than Fred Thompson) would have been a better choice than John McCain. We just didn't have a very good pool of candidates.