Looking back on the primaries

The Article I'm about to link to (Gary Ater at American Chronicle) got me thinking about conservatives and the anti-McCain spat during the primaries. First, the link...

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/58217

I was one of those anti-McCain people. I supported Romney, and the disputes between McCain and Romney, and Huckabee and Romney had my blood boiling. But like many other conservatives, McCain was the last on my list of candidates.

Now that the GOP primaries are over, most talk radio hosts and pundits who opposed McCain have now come over to his side are are supporting him.

The question is, why all the anger in the first place? McCain has been the he is for quite a long time, and conservatives have butted heads with him in the past. We knew what he was all about, and that's why we didn't want him. But the anger can be explained another way. First, that the Democrats were having a heydey with their two favorite candidates. It was almost unfair that Republicans couldn't love their candidates as much. Just as the Democrats were getting candidates they agreed with, THIS TIME, we (conservatives) felt, we want someone who has no cracks in the conservative armor. We love Dubya, but we don't want another Dubya. We loved Reagan, but Reagan made mistakes. THIS TIME, we thought, we want someone who is everything we believe in.

Both parties' voters feel the weight of having to 'compromise' on a candidate they don't completely agree with. Senator John Kerry was a "compromise" because he was going to continue the Iraq war, was not going to implement universal health care, and was only for "civil unions." Add to that the fact that Kerry didn't exactly exhude The Common Man theme, while George W. Bush did. And finally with Obama and Hillary, things felt right (er, left), things felt good.

Republicans had less of a hard time accepting their candidates. Despite differences with Bush on illegal-immigration, spending, or even the Iraq War, most conservatives still like Bush on a personal level.

So when the winds shifted, and the Republican candidate field was filled with problematic candidates, it was inevitable that John McCain would get blasted. In reality, Senator McCain is no farther left than Bush or Reagan, except perhaps on business.

There was long stretch period where Republicans where trying to figure out who was going to be The Man. At first it was Giuliani, because he had name recognition and was seen as having a lot of crossover appeal. But as talk radio host Michael Savage has phased it, Giuliani didn't play much beyond the Potomac.

Then there was Fred Thompson who lead Giuliani in the polls for some weeks, despite the fact he hadn't even announced. But Thompson never defeated the stigma that he was a lazy man, and his late entry into the race only confirmed the stigma. I figure, if you can't beat the stigma about being lazy, it probably means you ARE lazy.

So the race was whittled down, and the three remaining candidates were John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Ron Paul. Putting Paul aside, voters were starting to realize that they weren't going to choose a candidate they agreed with completely (which would have been someone like Fred Thompson)...for various reasons, enough people were drawn to McCain to beat out Romney. By the time Romney dropped out, he and McCain were close in popular votes, and closer in the delegate count.

It was a self-flagellation process that Republican voters went through this past primary season, and the candidate we ended up choosing was the one we thought we were farthest from. Why? Because John McCain, we realized, was the most seasoned candidate we had ever had. Nobody, Reagan or Bush, was as qualified a human being as McCain to become President of the United States.

It's also strange to observe the --again, shifting winds--place that GOP voters are at right now, versus the place Democratic voters are at right now. The Obama VS Hillary narrative has only gotten more and more heated, while GOP voters have healed their wounds and are prepared to vote for McCain.