This is the complete conservative critique of John McCain, and all the efforts by the MSM to encourage Republican voters to turn their eyes away from it will not work.  GOP activists and conervative loyalists have been poked in those eyes too many times by Senator McCain over the past eight years to lose the memories of those assaults.

Which is not to say that Romney will win the nomination, though I hope he does.  Fred Thompson rose up out of his political grave in last night's debate and hammered Mike Huckabee in terms every conservative understood to be devastatingly true.  And Rudy is waiting in Florida having successfully defined victory as victory there.  Huck will take his guitar and a sack of southern delegates to St. Paul, and his fans are indifferent to policy arguments.

What will decide this thing?  The Luntz focus groups on Sunday and Thursday night which went overwhelmingly to Romney and Thompson respectively tell us what Republican voters prize most of all: Fight in their candidates.  This may be because of what we know lies ahead in the fall, when not just an energized Dem nominee assaults them day after day, but when Soros et al unleash their tens of millions and the leftie nutroots scream BushCo and Halliburton at the top of their virtual lungs 24/7.  The GOP knows it will need a fighter full of energy and optimism who will both argue the case for Reagan conservatism and do so with the graciousness and charm that will be a sharp contrast with the angry left.

Which brings us back to Senator McCain.  His debate performance last night was wobbly, with meandering answers and an occasional grimace or misplaced wink.  He fell back on his tired answers and many were exact repeats of Sunday night's programming.  When he wandered through answer after answer it gradually dawned that he is indeed way past his prime, a Bob Dole without the energy.  Sure, he tramps from event to event, but at 71 he is not the same maverick he was at 63 when the McCain phenomenon swept New Hampshire and Michigan before running into conservative reality in South Carolina.  Even the McCain enthusiasts watch this aging warrior and know that he could no more win in the fall than Dole could in '96.  Politics is not exclusively a young man's game, but it is most definitely not an old man's game either.

A GOP vote for McCain is a vote for a shattered base and a desultory campaign in the fall. It is a vote for lecture after lecture on global warming, campaign finance reform, and the bridge to nowhere.  It is a vote for an old warrior way past his prime and the prospect of three debates against Barack Obama in which the age and energy gap goes unremarked upon while devastatingly obvious.

"[W]e’re looking at the media trying to make Barack Obama the president, and make John McCain the shill for him," Rick Santorum told me. "I think they know that John McCain can’t win this election," he concluded.

Of course they are.  Of course they do.  But the GOP voters won't fall for it.