The Elephant in the Room: The conservative jury is still out on backing McCain

Why are so many conservative Republicans upset about the inevitable nomination of Sen. John McCain, and what are we going to do about it?

The cause of conservative discontent isn't hard to fathom. Start with the Arizona senator's voting record on many key issues. He has opposed pro-growth tax cuts and supported limits on political speech. He has pushed amnesty when it came to illegal immigration and half-measures when it came to interrogating terrorists. He wants to close Guantanamo and allow the reimportation of prescription drugs into the United States. Not only does he part company with conservatives on these and other issues - climate change, drilling for oil in the Alaskan hinterland, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, international criminal courts, gun-show background checks - he invariably adopts the rhetoric of the left and stridently leads the opposition.

Set all this against the issues on which he's led conservatives over his three decades in the Senate - opposition to pork-barrel spending and support of the Iraq War - and you can sense why conservatives worry about where McCain's passions lie.

Of course, this wouldn't be the first time Republicans nominated a moderate to carry their banner in November. In fact, from the Great Depression until 1980, Republican presidential candidates were almost exclusively moderates. So why is the prospect of one more Republican moderate atop the ticket causing many conservatives to talk about forming a third party or voting for Hillary Clinton, for goodness' sake?

Because the Republican Party is not the party it was into the 1970s, and neither is the Democratic Party, in spades.

The Republican Party was founded as the antislavery party. It was, thus, a regional party. After the Civil War, the North and Upper Midwest were Republican, the South and Southwest Democratic. With the exception of the solidly Democratic Catholic vote in the Northeast, the North was virtually a one-party region right up to the Great Depression.

I remember walking through the state Senate chamber in Harrisburg and seeing the pictures of the 50 state senators who served at the turn of the last century. It was astounding; 49 of them were Republican.