Will Bob Barr and Ron Paul Out-Flank McCain on the Right?

With GOP toe-sucker Dick Morris publicly urging McCain to shed his far right extremism and move to the center if he's going to have any chance at all to win a few states outside of the Old Confederacy plus Utah, Wyoming and Idaho, a very different kind of reality is closing in on McCain who, says toe-sucker, "has been dealt a terrible hand: a tanking economy, an unpopular war, a Republican incumbent whose approval ratings are at their all-time low and a gloomy national mood, with 82 percent of Americans saying in a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week that the country is on the wrong track." He offers the hapless Republican nominee a roadmap, a roadmap dependent of Jeremiah Wright-- "the honorary chairman of McCain's get-out-the-vote efforts"-- even though every voter in red, red, red Mississippi first congressional district was inundated with Jeremiah Wright and still voted against Bush and the GOP.

The growing fear of Obama, who remains something of an unknown, will drag every last white Republican male off the golf course to vote for McCain, and he will need no further laying-on of hands from either evangelical Christians or fiscal conservatives.

So McCain doesn't have to spend a lot of time wooing his base. What he does need to do is reduce the size of the synapse over which independents and fearful Democrats need to pass in order to back his candidacy. If the synapse is wide, they will stay with Obama. But if they perceive McCain as an acceptable alternative, there is every chance that they will cross over to back him in November.

But even as toe sucker/Fox News shill admits that McBush's endless war in Iraq agenda could kill the deal, another dynamic has arisen that negates whatever toe sucking meditations popped into Morris' demented little right-wing brain: Bob Barr.

Micah Sifry, a lot smarter and far more with it than Morris was even when he was relevant, thinks if McCain doesn't watch his right flank, he's a dead duck. He warns that if McCain follows the toe-sucker's strategy Barr will siphon off enough votes to insure a McCain loss, "not because Barr is such a compelling candidate, but because he could become the vehicle for the many disaffected Republicans gathered under Paul's flag."

More than a million votes have been cast for Paul, about 5 percent of the total cast in Republican primaries so far.

Paul's activists are swarming local Republican party committees and conventions, quietly capturing or lining up delegates in states such as Alaska, Missouri, Minnesota, Florida, Texas and Washington.

And on the Web, the Paul movement -- which, astonishingly, generated enough grassroots support to make him the top Republican presidential money-raiser in the fourth quarter of 2007 -- is still going strong. His Web site is getting about 50,000 unique visitors per week, compared to 90,000 for McCain, according to data marketing company Compete.com. (The two Democratic candidates' combined traffic is about six times higher.) On Google, people are searching for the term "Ron Paul" almost as often as "John McCain." And Paul's new book, "The Revolution: A Manifesto," which has been topping Amazon's sales chart for weeks, hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list today.

Clearly, one sizable chunk of the Republican base -- small-government types who also oppose the Iraq war -- hasn't reconciled itself to voting for McCain. In Minneapolis, at the Republican National Convention, Paul may have a couple dozen delegates and enough street presence to spoil McCain's show. These days, all it takes is one person with a Web-enabled mobile phone to put live video on the Internet, and Paul's fans have already shown how good they are at using the Web to spread messages and keep their movement going. So even if the Republicans manage to keep Paul himself off the stage at the convention, his voice will still be heard. If Barr manages to capture the attention of Paul's base, it could spell real danger for McCain.

McCain will be forced to name an extremist wingnut-- either Buy Bull-thumpin' Mike Huckabee or someone genuinely insane like Jim DeMint (R-SC) or Richard Burr (R-NC) of Tom Coburn (R-OK)-- as a running mate. And since many Americans expect to see the first sitting president since the assassinated JFK to die in office if McCain gets elected, the running mate decision will take on unusual significance. What pleases the nutty base is likely to scare mainstream Americans.