Is McCain, as the subhed has it, the “best man” to unite America? Well, I think he’d have to be. Let me stress that “uniting America” isn’t necessarily the highest priority of the next president — perhaps Barack Obama would not “unite with” about 35 percent of the country that is bitterly opposed to his agenda, and I think that’s fair nough. But McCain would, in my view, be forced to unite America because he became the standard-bearer of a minority faction in our politics. How could McCain govern without engaging in really radical outreach to Democrats and independents? ~Reihan

This is right, and I wonder whether my original remarks on Reihan’s column were entirely fair.  After all, in the improbable event of a McCain win, the next administration would be faced with a hostile Congress and an electorate that would have elected McCain in spite of its hostility to the Republican Party.  His main concern would be to placate the majority, and not shore up his support within the party.  Besides, were McCain to win, Palin would be sent off to tamp down conservative rebellions and make a lot of rhetoric about how much the President appreciates their support.  With the exception of needing a couple votes in the Senate from time to time to eliminate the possibility of a filibuster, on many issues McCain would not need to bring along that many other Republicans.  What they think of him would not be that important during the first two years, and depending on midterms he might feel free to ignore them for much of his first term. 

There is a factor I overlooked before.  This is the habit of rallying to the President of your party, which Republicans are even more likely to do as a result of their postwar dependency on winning the White House as their main route to power.  Were McCain to win, it would delay and probably quash any nascent conservative skepticism about the expanding power of the executive branch, as the Presidency would once again become the sole focus of national Republican politics, and there would once again be a strong impulse to defend the administration against its critics.  (You can already see why a McCain victory would be very unhealthy for conservatism, whatever else it might bring.)  Even though conservatives would probably find important parts of McCain’s domestic agenda to be somewhere between annoying and appalling, their instinct to support “their” President would be powerful and would be particularly hard to resist so long as we have ongoing foreign wars.