1. This is a courtship?  The first thing a political party's presidential candidate does is try to woo his base supporters.  They've got to be so enamored with the candidate that they'll do all the drudge work-calling voters, putting up signs, addressing envelopes, all that fun stuff.  Only after you're married at the hip with your base do you go after the independents and members of the other party who may vote for you.  (Note: This is not, as the liberals like to frame it, "going to the center."  Rather you pick issues that resonate both with conservatives and independents, and you may employ less ideologically infused rhetoric.)

John McCain has been the "presumptive" GOP candidate for more than three months-three months that have been wasted, with no wooing of the conservative base.  Oh, he picks some issues that he knows will appeal to conservatives, such as tax cuts, but then he becomes the GOP poster boy for the global warming scam.  It's the same old McCain zig-zag that has marked all of his career.

Conservatives are saying there never has been a courtship.  It's as if they immediately have been married for 15 years and the spouse is taking them for granted.  The result is predictable:  At best (from the GOP's perspective) conservatives may drag themselves to the polls to vote against Obama, but they're not heating up the neighborhood for McCain.  And when conservatives don't do the legwork, nobody does the legwork.  Bye bye McCain.

2. That doesn't mean conservatives are dead.  They're just playing dead to the GOP establishment.  Give them some red meat and they become pit bulls.  A case in point is Ron Paul's new 501c3 organization, Campaign for Liberty.  When he launched it last week, he set a goal of 100,000 members by Labor Day weekend.  Within three days he had met half of his goal-50,000 members!  Paul supporters are the most dedicated and energetic political force anywhere on the ideological spectrum today, and their energy is not transferable to moderate or liberal Republicans

3. Conservatives do have choices this year.  The Libertarian Party has nominated Rep. Bob Barr, former head of the Clinton impeachment team, as its presidential candidate.  In past years the LP has sometimes-when under the control of "left" libertarians-seemed to be trying to purposely alienate conservatives.  That won't happen this year.  Barr is a conservative libertarian, and he knows how to appeal to and connect to the conservative base.

Meanwhile, the Constitution Party has nominated a conservative evangelical preacher, Rev. Chuck Baldwin, who knows how to get the conservative congregation out of the pews and into the streets.  With two candidates who are professional talkers and who love to talk 24/7, the Libertarian Party and Constitution Party are poised to draw much-needed votes and energy away from McCain and the GOP.

4. Then we come to the Obamacons-conservatives and libertarians who are so angry at Bush and McCain, primarily over the Iraq war and occupation, that they're voting for Obama as the only sure way to keep McCain out of the White House.  So far this group seems to consist mostly of policy wonks, writers, and former high-level bureaucrats-many of them Reaganites.  Their following among the masses will not be huge-more conservatives will just sit at home on Election Day-but the race is so tight that McCain can't afford to lose even 1% or 2% of his conservative base to Obama.

Bottom line:  We have a lukewarm to frigid marriage between most conservatives and McCain.  The Paulites are already out of the family, and others are being wooed away by Barr, Baldwin, and Obama.  In a year that's a very bad year for Republicans to begin with, that spells disaster for McCain and the Big Government Republicans in November.