A number of political conservatives have been beating up on John McCain as insufficiently conservative. It's fathomable, but just barely so.

We catch a few fellow Republican senators and some conservative activists saying things like, "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine" (Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi) and "McCain's record is as bad and liberal as Hillary's" (Ann Coulter, the columnist). Nor does it help that The New York Times is friendly to him. Or that Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed him the other day. Or I don't know, for the moment, the McCain backlash on the right seems out of control.

The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes instructs his fellow conservatives to "grow up."

I might myself put it this way: Who you got that's better? Meaning not only better but capable of winning the election?

There's Mike Huckabee, whose foreign-policy credentials are zilch and who, one suspects, for all the moral perspectives he expresses so well, hasn't thoroughly thought through the reasons that government regulation of the marketplace is generally a bad idea.

There is, or was, Fred Thompson, whose impact on the race was that of a Lincoln penny tossed into a reflecting pool.

There is, sort of, Ron Paul, whose sensible economic policies and craving for isolationism are out of sync.

There is, of course, Mitt Romney. The Romneyites are bitter at McCain. I'm not sure why. Presumably because they see their man as the true-blue Reaganite in the race. But that makes minimal sense. This is Mitt, who, in Massachusetts, made health-insurance acquisition compulsory without figuring out what to do with people who can't afford it. Nor, a few years ago, from the right's perspective, was Mitt up to snuff on gay rights and abortion. He has recanted on the social questions. Does this indemnify him against accusations of political perfidy? Continued...