Yesterday’s post-Super-Tuesday blogging was a bit chaotic–and you really only need to read Richelieu anyways, right? With Mitt Romney now out of the race, McCain is the clear nominee. But what should his next move be? Yesterday morning, McCain said said, “Is there a lot of work to unite the entire party? Sure. After the campaigns are over, you’ve always got the task of uniting the party behind the nominee.” Bloggers discuss the ways he could do this. At the Wall Street Journal blog, Alex Frangos reports, “His pitch will be as much about showing that McCain is actually conservative — promoting his hawkish positions on the military and fiscal matters, for instance — as convincing conservatives that by not supporting McCain, they open the door to something worse: the Democrats.” Some bloggers think McCain would be wise to try to appeal to the right-wing conservatives. The CNN Political Ticker says this is important because “[d]espite big wins in the Super Tuesday contests, McCain has yet to secure the support of his party’s conservative side.” At Hot Air, Allahpundit describes the McCain campaign’s efforts to woo the talk radio/CPAC crowd, and Bryan Preston predicts what McCain will say: “He’ll make conciliatory sounds but underneath will be the same John McCain, secure in his own mind that he’s winning without conservatives so there’s no reason to change anything for them.” But a lot of bloggers have other ideas. WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor John Podhoretz says, “[T]here is something a little lunatic in the demand that he essentially overhaul his campaign approach now, right this second. Because the thing is, he’s winning with his current strategy. It’s the other guys — the moderate-turned-movement-conservative and the Southern-Christian — who aren’t winning.” And the Fix’s Chris Cillizza says that if McCain was Tuesday’s winner, then “conservative talk radio” was the loser: “Rush Limbaugh went all out to rally support for Romney — or at the very least suppress votes for McCain. It didn’t work. While McCain won among self-identified conservatives in only three of the nine states covered by exit polls bought by The Post, he won the raw vote in six of the nine.” And many right-wing bloggers are in fact coming around to McCain. Yesterday, Hugh Hewitt wrote, “Romney and Huckabee ought to begin to note Senator McCain’s lead and urge their followers to recognize that if they cannot come back they and their followers will have to come in and join the party’s eventual nominee…There are seven reasons for anyone to support the eventual nominee no matter who it is: The war and six Supreme Court justices over the age of 68.” And John Hinderaker says that conservatives need to come to their senses: “Within the party, it’s time to dial down the hyperbole, quit burning bridges and start building them.” At Pajamas Media Roger L. Simon has a suggestion for conservatives at CPAC: “You are expecting John McCain to meet you at least halfway (or maybe more) on Thursday. Why don’t you think about meeting him halfway as well? He has something to do that you don’t. He has to win a presidential election.”
