On Sen. John McCain, Pesidential Candidate 2008:

"He has to be the leader of not just a movement, but the party,” Mr. McKinnon [Mark McKinnon, a Texas political media consultant who has worked for Mr. Bush for years] said. “That’s a whole different drill.” — Today's New York Times.

Many Republican voters find it difficult imagining that they would bother to come out to vote for the glib senator, whose smiles and jokes on John Stewart's The Daily Show seem to mark him as friendly to liberals. We recently heard from a Florida Republican insider who said at this point it appeared that many Republican voters would simply stay home in 2008 rather than vote for McCain, echoing what we have been told by Republican insiders in both Illinois and Pennsylvania.

When we asked our Republican contacts if McCain could sway the religious right by making the right overtures to the leadership, they were unanimous in their belief that the vast majority of the religious right would never vote for the Senator even if it meant that other rawly ambitious senator, the one from New York, ended up in the White House. And we thought it was the Demos who were the stubborn ones, as represented by their mascot.