"I'm waiting for pro-life voters to remember this guy named "I'm waiting for pro-life voters to remember this guy named John McCain," says Yglesias. Relatedly, Tom lays out the case that McCain could be the Republican Kerry, the guy who slips up the middle when the frontrunner implodes. There are a couple things to be said for this. In terms of his opportunity, there's no serious question; Romney is in a considerably shakier position than Dean was at a similar time, and Guiliani and Thompson both have obvious problems. And logically, I agree that McCain (assuming that Huckabee can't win) seems like the best choice for ordinary social conservatives; my opinions about that aren't terribly relevant, of course, but actual social conservative Ramesh Ponnuru makes a persuasive case. The problem, however, is that -- especially after what McCain said about various cultural conservative leaders in 2000 and for a couple years after -- McCain is disliked by a lot of people within his own party, who (rightly or wrongly) seem to see him as a Republican Lieberman. And this is the biggest difference with Kerry. Nobody in the Democratic Party had any particular issue with him; he was ideally positioned as the plain vanilla liberal to take advantage after Dean's campaign was mortally wounded in Iowa. McCain really isn't in the same position. He has a lot of important enemies within the party. Admittedly, I also thought Kerry was dead in 2003. And with Huckabee unacceptable to the most powerful faction in the GOP and Thompson seemingly campaigning from a hammock, there's really no Kerry-equivalent plain vanilla conservative who's both 1)a strong candidate and 2)lacks strong opposition. But I still think a McCain win is a real longshot, and I think Romney can survive losing in Iowa. --Scott Lemieux
