How Did McCain Become the GOP Nominee?

Adam Graham's column at Renew America has some useful advice for conservatives (for the future) that might help us prevent another liberal nominee like John McCain.

I differ with Graham in some areas, primarily in his assessment of criticism against Mike Huckabee. Graham appears to have a soft spot for the pro-life liberal, believing some of the criticism of Huckabee was too harsh, but I maintain Huckabee deserved to be nailed to the wall for his soft-on-crime, soft-on-border-control and soft-on-terrorism comments and record--especially when far better candidates were still in the game.

But Graham makes some good points.

One is that many conservatives came out against certain candidates, but never indicated who they were for.

Another area cited by Graham goes along with that, in that too many conservatives were not engaged early in doing their research, finding the right candidate and getting behind them (I'm guilty of that to some extent--wish I'd realized what a solidly conservative candidate Duncan Hunter was much earlier). Candidates who don't have media and establishment backing need ground-up buzz to get their campaigns going; they can't do that if the base is sitting on its hands, or trying to figure out not who's the best candidate but who's "electable."

One of the most important facts Graham points out is that when you're dealing with an establishment candidate, you can never turn your back on them and assume they're done until their campaign is gone, gone, gone. That's another mistake I made. I assumed early on that McCain wouldn't get anywhere (and at first, he wasn't), that too many people saw through him and were tired of him.

But when we conservatives as a collective group wrote off the good candidates like Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo and Sam Brownback as "unelectable," then succeeded in pointing out the liberal records of rising contenders like Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney, that left McCain as pretty much the last man standing.

I hope we do better next time, because, barring a miracle, for November 2008 it looks like our choices are going to be bad and worse.