Richard Whalen

Over the past 28 years, the candidate who has won the South Carolina Republican primary has gone on to win the party’s nomination – a testament both to the Palmetto State’s importance and to the GOP’s enduring national governing ascendancy.

Senator John McCain’s smashing victory in South Carolina’s GOP primary has lifted the “curse” of his defeat there in 2000. Voters in exit polls identified themselves as 8 in 10 Republican and one in three “very” conservative.

The decisive factor for the “maverick” McCain: this time, unlike 2000, he had the support of some of the state party’s establishment. They see him as a winner at the top of the 2008 national GOP ticket who will help protect their own state and local candidates down lower on the ballot.

As he showed in South Carolina, McCain has the same broadly popular appeal to Independents and Democrats that Reagan possessed. This greatly enhances his electability, but raises suspicions among narrowly ideological conservatives. The churlish George Will dismisses McCain as an ill-tempered “moralizer.” Conservative Rick Lowry, editor of National Review, cheers McCain’s victory, achieved by running to the right, emphasizing his national security credentials and all-but ignored fiscal conservatism as well as his pro-life voting record in the Senate.

McCain, measured by his experience and his personal qualities, is the “class” figure in the GOP field. He is the leader of a party that wants to win, not the post-Bush burnt-out GOP gang in Washington who know they deserve to lose and want a rest. Many Bushies assume they can earn big bucks lobbying against the anti-business legislation to be expected from a more heavily Democratic Congress.

Liz Smith reminds me that Reagan once told his staff: “Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

Those who long for “another Reagan” do not remember – or perhaps do not even know – how he got there. After the GOP’s disastrous 1964 defeat, behind Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Reagan assumed leadership of the conservative movement left in the wilderness. For 16 years, including Nixon’s 1968 victory and the subsequent Watergate debacle, Reagan consolidated and built the Republican Party into a governing vehicle. (See an interesting article about “In Search of Reagan” from the New York Times.)

This is what McCain can revitalize – a governing conservative majority, measured not by ideological purity and promises but by solid achievements through wise, practical skill and necessary respect for and political compromise with cooperative minorities.