Believe it or not, I think E.J. Dionne has a point.  John McCain’s biggest weakness is the huge reservoir of enmity and mistrust he’s built up over the past seven years in the GOP base whose votes he is going to need to capture the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.  He’s wasted no opportunity to shaft his own party on its most valued conservative causes in no small part as retribution for being rejected eight years ago in favor of George W. Bush.  For a man of McCain’s titanic (even for a U.S. senator) ego, that was an unforgiveable afront.  It was his turn, bleep it, and it was those blankety-blank right-wingers who denied it to him and handed it to that smirking, malapropositic frat boy instead.  Don’t think for a moment that he’s forgotten, much less forgiven, any of it.

From ”Sailor’s” two primary wins so far, it seems that there is a significant plurality of Republican voters who have - foolishly - forgotten and/or forgiven him.  But still not enough to relieve his dependency upon non-Republicans, who cannot ultimately skew him over the top in the preponderance of “closed” contests upcoming.  He’s going to need to bamboozle more ‘Pubbies to fully seize frontrunner status, and just as he needs to lurch right-ward in order to capture Florida, here comes Rudy Giuliani out of the nowhere in which he’s been residing for the past two months ready to pounce on both the social issues ground McCain would be vacating (implicitly) to head off Huckabee and the economic policy ground toward which McCain is trying (explicitly) to tack.

That is a more formidable task, I think, than Ed thinks it is:

The major differences between McCain and the conservative base isn’t policy as much as it is tone….McCain has to make amends with the base on two policy issues, McCain-Feingold and McCain Kennedy.

Anybody paying attention to John McCain’s gleeful policy heresies of the past seven years knows that policy and tone are, for him, two sides of the same coin.  And it isn’t just on campaign finance reform and immigration amnesty that the “Arizona maverick” has burned down the reservation.  There’s his classist opposition to the Bush tax cuts, his championing of environmental extremism while still Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, his “anti-torture” crusade that seeks to accord full constitutional rights to captured enemy combatants and kneecap efforts to gather critical intelligence needed to prevent terrorist attacks.  And dare any of us forget arguably McCain’s biggest back-stab of all, the “Gang of 14″ deal that nullified any attempt to terminate Senate Democrats’ extra-constitutional filibusters of appellate court nominations.  In that one piece of spiteful backroom manuevering John McCain signed the death warrant for his party’s Senate majority and displayed his faithlessness to the Constitution he wants to be sworn in to uphold.

And now that he needs the votes of that self-same Republican base that he has scorned for all these years, “Mr. Straight Talk” is pandering to them with all his weasely might.

Speaking for myself, it isn’t so much that I don’t like John McCain - though I do not have any affinity for pompous asses with volcanic tempers - as that I don’t trust him.

Case in point:

Saturday night, the senator gave an uplifting and patriotic speech that highlighted America-first security and freedom against the jihadist enemy abroad and heavyhanded government at home. Focusing on conservative values and pro-growth economics, McCain defended the free market, low taxes, and small government.

In an interview McCain said he would make the Bush tax cuts permanent, cut the corporate tax, and restrain spending. On the so-called stimulus package, he said he would not support a larded up pork-barrel package. This is a well-balanced tax-and-spending-cut message. 

Nice words.  Wish I could believe them.  Wish I could believe that he has “recanted” on the McCain-Kennedy “shamnesty” that he’s pushed with a zealot’s fervor in consecutive congresses (the last such iconoclastic lib cause he championed so stubbornly?  McCain-Feingold).  But sorry, gentlebeings, I’m not buying it.  Seven (more than that, really) years of treacherous deeds are not outweighed by a reassuring speech and interview.  To me it is prima facie evidence of the utter, sizzling contempt in which he holds the Right that he thinks all he has to do is belch Reaganistic bromides in our direction the one time when he needs us and we’ll swoon right onto his bandwagon.

We had better hope that there are still enough conservatives who haven’t forgotten John McCain’s chronic, deliberate, burr-up-the-saddle-ness to ensure that “Sailor”’s betrayals won’t be rewarded with the prize he was rightly denied nearly a decade ago.  Otherwise we’re headed for the biggest swindle of all - a general election heel (i.e. left) turn that will functionally disenfranchise the Right and delight his media pals - and one that, frankly, we’ll deserve if we demonstrate, by nominating John McCain, that his contempt for us was thoroughly well-earned.

[Cross-posted at Hard Starboard]