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If John McCain is somehow prevented from winning the nomination, it won’t be because of his fellow candidates.

Last night, the rest of the field refused to lay a glove on McCain. Many conservatives I talk to still assume he will fall of his own weight. And, truth be told, the other campaigns’ visceral dislike of Mitt Romney is blinding them to the need for a strong voice to articulate the conservative base’s deep distrust of McCain.

For McCain, a seemingly impossible confluence of events have had the effect of parting the waters for his previously treacherous path to the nomination.

First, McCain emerged from the back of the pack. The conservative establishment didn’t know if this was serious or not, so they didn’t organize. At the outset, Romney probably found this useful to knock off Rudy in NH. Then Rudy decided he didn’t have the warewithal to challenge his friend McCain in a pro-choice, Northeastern state.

In Iowa too, Huckabee used McCain as a club to bash Romney. Romney only started attacking McCain in late December, and then only on McCain’s home field of New Hampshire.

Okay, I can see letting New Hampshire slip. That happened in 2000. But certainly South Carolina could be counted on finish him off for us. Is McCain getting any heat there?

Not much.

Mitt Romney has to save himself first, and he’s doing that in Michigan. That probably necessitates a pivot to a more positive message. Like other cash-strapped candidates, he’s counting on Huckabee to finish the job in SC. It’s also probably too late for any 527s to get going.

The paradox here is that while a McCain loss is more likely in South Carolina, Huckabee is the candidate most likely to let McCain off the ropes. Like Rudy, he seems to be running for Mr. Congeniality at times. Huckabee’s path to the nomination lies in convincing conservatives why John McCain was so unacceptable to them to begin with. He has to make a decision about whether he’s running for President or Vice President.

As for Rudy, if he gets to make the case in Florida, his tax argument is a good start, but it’s not enough. Rudy will need to make the case that he has the temperament to be Commander-in-Chief — and be willing to get personal in the way that McCain already has with Bernie Kerik and the 9/11 swiftboats.

FDT is in many ways the most natural person to make the case — with the most conservative movement credentials of any candidate — but it’s hard to tell if he’s still in it or is just a sleeper cell for his Washington buddy McCain, siphoning votes away from Huckabee in South Carolina.

The other candidates personally like McCain. Their staff tend to be more moderate than the GOP primary electorate, so they many have trouble seeing just how dispirited the base would be with McCain as the nominee, particularly if Obama manages to pull it out, but also against Hillary.

It’s time to take the gloves off. If you assume that McCain can still lose this, it’s a matter of driving straight down the fairway to Minneapolis-St. Paul. If you assume he’ll still be the nominee, it’s a matter of testing whether conservatives can set aside some pretty serious objections to a likely nominee.

If conservative distrust of McCain still isn’t as big a deal as I think it is, so be it. But the nomination is too serious to approach this with anything but eyes wide open. We can’t afford to get buyer’s remose — of the kind we’ve already had with McCain for most of the last eight years — particularly as he tacks left against the Democrats and his general election numbers sink back to where they were when he was last under attack in the spring.

Primaries and the sharp jabs that come with them are good for the process. They ensure we have a nominee who is thoroughly vetted. The last thing we need is what happened to the Democrats in 2004, when Kerry emerged at the last minute, wasn’t tested, and turned out to be a horrible candidate in the general.