for the Rs to nominate McCain is their optimal winningest strategy

Thesis: in strategic terms, for the Republicans to nominate John McCain is about the best move they could make. It moves to the center, and it implicitly repudiates the excesses of the neocons, such as waterboarding. If they nominated a Coulter-approved ideologue, they'd get only the ideologue vote at this point. Picking McCain tells the moderates that they're finding their way back to the party of Eisenhower, which nowadays sounds like a comparatively decent place to be, even from our side.

This means that once again, an election that should have been a cakewalk (heh) might be a real fight. But luckily for us, McCain is not only hated by some of the exact same people who most hate Hillary, he also remains intractably albatrossed with Bushness on the one issue that finally turned people off to Bush in the first place: the war. So one thing that has to happen by fall is to bring the war back to the center of the debate. (This will of course work better if Obama is our candidate, and he spells out a plan that's a bit more realistic than his health care plan.)

The silver lining is that if McCain does win, he's perfectly placed to do what Eisenhower managed to do by the end of his term: isolate the far right from the mainstream of his party. The way things look now, he might end up doing this without even trying. That could make America a better place even a decade after he's gone.

Your whole thesis is off.

There's a lot more to neoconnery than just being hawkish.