As I’ve argued before, there’s no way John McCain is going to win the Republican nomination in 2008. Establishment conservatives dislike him too much. Grover Norquist, the influential head of Americans for Tax Reform, called McCain a “gun-grabbing, tax-increasing Bolshevik.” And in a recent profile of Norquist in The New Yorker, David Keene, the president of American Conservative Union, went even further, saying that “The ultimate danger point for the [Republican] Party is a McCain candidacy. If he runs and gets nominated, there will be a third-party conservative candidate, and the Democrats will probably win.”

You can argue that this isn’t a credible threat because conservatives would still ultimately prefer President McCain to President Hillary and thus wouldn’t run a third-party candidate. But as Ralph Nader proved in 2000, all it takes is one disenchanted purist to get on the ballot and siphon off votes in key states. And more importantly, if key activists like Norquist and Keene hate McCain this much, they’re likely to sabotage him before he can ever win the nomination.