Not to beat this into the ground, but on a second reading Ross’ concluding remarks in his post on McCain caught my attention:

But, um, Senator McCain, you did notice that Ron Paul topped out at about 5-10 percent of the vote, didn’t you?  And that every other candidate in the race (allowing for certain variations) took roughly the same foreign-policy line as you? Doesn’t that at the very least suggest that there might be more pressing battles awaiting a politician looking to reinvent the Republican Party than a crusade against the isolationist menace? Please? 

Here’s some speculation for you: maybe McCain’s concern isn’t so much about the people who voted for Paul as it is about the unbelievably large numbers of antiwar voters who voted for McCain in the primaries.  Perhaps McCain noticed this, even if his pro-war admirers ignored it, and became anxious about all these antiwar McCainiacs, making him think that beating back the brushfires of “isolationism” was one of his major tasks.  Okay, probably not.  More likely it derived from McCain’s annoyance at being asked how long American forces would be in Iraq (the origin of his “100 years” remark).  Perhaps McCain has become so geared towards intervention and U.S. power projection that even mere questions about bringing our forces back at some point in the future strike him as evidence of the rise of “Fortress America” politics.  If that is the line he wants to take, he may find that when he begins rattling off the list of all the places where we have soldiers and bases he will eventually encounter the rejoinder, “Why do we still have soldiers in all these other countries, too?”  This has struck me as one of the main weaknesses of the argument for permanent bases in Iraq: likening a continued presence in Iraq to  bases in Germany, South Korea and Kuwait draws attention to just how unnecessary those deployments are as well. 

Another possibility is that McCain found the presence of even one antiwar candidate in the GOP field deeply troubling.  In a party in which even Sam Brownback was found to be lacking in sufficient zeal for the war in Iraq, because he dared question certain aspects of the “surge,” the idea that there was any antiwar constituency was probably very shocking to McCain.  Perhaps his thinking is this: even one extreme long-shot House member garnering 10% of the vote is one antiwar candidate too many, and so perhaps he views Paul’s candidacy as evidence of “isolationism” that has to be squashed before it can grow.  Who knows?  The good news is that this revelation tells us that McCain’s political judgement is terrible, which means that he will probably make a terrible VP selection and lose the general election by a large margin.

Another point: according to that 2007 Fabrizio survey I like to come back to every so often, approximately 8% of Republicans are the so-called “Fortress America” sort and 8% are the so-called “Free Marketeers,” but the latter have vastly outsized influence within the party despite their relatively small numbers and the “Fortress America” voters have even less influence than their nominal one-tenth of the party would suggest.  If these different parts of the coalition were representing proportionately in Congress, you might have 15 antiwar Republican members of the House rather than a handful.  It is likely that these two groups made up the core of Ron Paul’s support among Republicans (his support among independent voters was typically as great if not greater), which means a couple of things: there was always something of a built-in ceiling within the GOP for a campaign focused heavily on the war and foreign policy plus a strong small-government, spending-cutting message, which Paul reached or nearly reached in many primaries, and the power of “isolationism” within the party that McCain thinks he has found was never very great.  What should worry McCain is that three or four times as many Republicans oppose the war as belong to this so-called “Fortress America” type of Republicanism, which means that many of his strongest supporters are at odds with him over the main issue of his campaign.