McCain’s showdown with Romney

What happened

Arizona Sen. John McCain won a bitterly contested Florida primary this week, positioning himself as the clear Republican front-runner in a two-candidate race. Mitt Romney, McCain’s leading rival, finished second, with 31 percent of the vote, five points behind McCain. Distant third-place finisher Rudy Giuliani, who had staked his candidacy on winning in Florida, dropped out of the race and threw his support to McCain. Mike Huckabee finished fourth, but vowed to carry his campaign into the “Super Tuesday” balloting on Feb. 5, when 21 states will hold GOP nominating contests. “My friends, in one week we will have as close to a national primary as we have ever had in this country,” McCain told his cheering supporters. “I intend to win it, and be the nominee of our party.”

Conservatives are portraying the showdown between McCain and Romney as a battle for the Republican Party’s soul. McCain, a long-time Senate maverick, appeals to Republican moderates, foreign-policy hawks, and independents, while Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, has remodeled himself as a stalwart social and economic conservative. Their intense dislike for each other became apparent in the final days of the Florida campaign, with Romney calling McCain a “liberal Democrat” who opposed tough interrogation of terrorists and supported “amnesty’’ for illegal immigrants, while McCain accused Romney of “wholesale deception” of voters. In the first state contest open only to registered Republicans, exit polls showed McCain winning the votes of moderates and independents, while Romney was backed by those calling themselves “very conservative.”

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What the editorials said

John McCain emerges from Florida’s slugfest as the GOP frontrunner,

but the race is far from over, said The Wall Street Journal. Although “the Republican establishment coalesced around the senator like it never has before,” Romney “won broadly among conservatives, which at least gives him hope that he can be competitive next week.” Now the race comes down to a single question: Can McCain convince the Republican base that he’s one of them, and “close the sale”?

Romney will be hard-pressed to break McCain’s momentum heading into Super Tuesday, said the New York Post. McCain’s narrow victory in Florida’s winner-take-all contest gives him 57 convention delegates, and just as important, a significant fund-raising boost. Despite McCain’s occasional lapses from party orthodoxy, “Republicans are growing to see him as the strongest candidate in November.”

What the columnists said

The shrinking of the Republican field is good news for Mitt Romney, said Mike Madden in Salon.com. With Giuliani out of the race and Huckabee a bit player, “conservative activists who never much liked McCain now have a sole alternative to line up behind.” One group has already launched a series of ads that compares the Arizona senator’s positions to Hillary Clinton’s, while radio talkers Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been denouncing him as a traitor to the Reagan revolution. If you think the campaign has been ugly so far, just wait.

In Florida, McCain wisely emphasized his support for tax cuts, tough judges, and other conservative principles, said Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online. If he’s smart, he’ll now hint that he’ll pick a vice president that the base likes, such as Fred Thompson; suggest he’d make Giuliani his attorney general; and go hat-in-hand to court the talk-show conservatives. “I pray that McCain can rally the base, since whatever anger conservatives hold toward him should pale in comparison to the specter of 16 years of the Clintons or Barack Obama’s European-style democratic socialism.”

Giuliani gambled and lost, but his strategy was not entirely ill-conceived, said John Hood in National Review Online. He guessed, correctly, that Romney, Huckabee, and Fred Thompson would fight one another to a standstill in the early contests, opening the biggest prize, Florida, to a late-charging contender. That’s just what happened, but instead of Giuliani being the beneficiary of the infighting, it was McCain.

What next?

McCain’s strongest argument is that he gives the GOP its best chance in November, said Ryan Sager in the New York Post. True, McCain would be hard-pressed to snatch the centrist vote away from Barack Obama, but in a McCain-Clinton race, he’d win most moderates and independents, leaving Hillary with little more than the Democrats’ liberal base. Confronted with the prospect of another Clinton presidency, conservatives may agree that “there are fates worse than John McCain.”