SF Chronicle: McCain must court GOP right.

Arizona Sen. John McCain closed in on the Republican presidential nomination Thursday with the exit of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, but now he faces an even bigger battle: winning over his party's conservative base.

The 71-year-old four-term senator sought to mend fences with his party's right flank at a gathering of conservative activists in Washington just hours after Romney told the same group that he was suspending his campaign.

But McCain's speech was met by cheers and a smattering of loud boos, and many of the activists said they would support him reluctantly if he becomes the nominee.

The senator admitted making mistakes, including failing to stress the need to secure the country's borders first in his immigration plan, which many conservatives denounce as amnesty for illegal immigrants.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/02/08/MNJOUUA9M.DTL


This is great news for us, methinks.

McCain 08 is not the McCain of 2000. And the McCain of 2000 was a hard Right dinosaur.

He speaks "eloquently" but the "eloquence" is ceremonial and not event-specific. It misses the point of what's happening around him and suggests to voters under the age of 114 that McCain is dated, out of it, Dud City.

That's how far off he is from what voters are saying in large numbers so far in this primary season. I'm imagining his campaign strategy meetings as a roomful of pre-Eisenhower types. That seems to be their frame of reference. As if there had been no JFK, no Dr. King, no Watergate, and so forth. No contemporary authors on the shelf, no input from anything past rotary phones.

THIS is what a divided party looks like. All of this bullshit about Hillary vs. Obama dividing the dems pales in comparison to what's going on in the GOP.

choose a nominee, it will be a strong one.

It looks as if McCain is theirs, and he's a weak one, and a large part of their base hates his guts.

And because most of the threads at the top of GD-P right now are teh retardedz.