Their chances for general election victory depend upon clarifying the contest’s status as a fight about personality, more than a fight about issues.

In fact, the leading candidates do agree on virtually every important policy for the nation’s future – both McCain and Romney want to persevere in Iraq till victory, to use force if necessary to prevent a nuclear Iran, to treat Islamo-Nazi terror as the profound evil it is, to shrink the size of government and to lower taxes. Both candidates want to curb abortion and defend innocent human life, protect gun rights, and preserve the institution of male-female marriage. Both seek to provide better access to cheaper health care by moving toward a more market based medical system, not through more government. On immigration, both candidates have taken notably tougher positions than they did a year ago, and agree on the need to secure the border first (by finishing the fence and hiring far more border patrol), while improving national ID and greatly enhancing workplace enforcement. As Governor Romney explicitly acknowledged at their South Carolina televised debate, on the top immigration priorities, there’s no meaningful distinction among any of the major candidates.

Their positions on issues remain so close that I can reproduce part of the official “candidate’s statement” from the State of Washington Voter Guide and you can’t be sure which of the GOP contenders authored it:

“At home, Americans have lost trust in their government. To restore their trust, I will secure our borders, veto pork-barrel bills, keep taxes low and reform our tax code. I will nominate judges who do not legislate from the bench. I will seek to modernize Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, bring choice and competition to our schools.”

Okay, quiz kids, which Republican contender authored those sentences? Romney, Huckabee or McCain?

The point is, it could have been any of them, so it’s hardly significant that the right answer here is …. John McCain.

If there’s so little difference on the big issues facing the party and the country, how can one possibly explain the frenzied hostility from some conservatives to Senator McCain? The fact that these angry voices want to dredge up long-ago disagreements with no current relevance indicates that their real object involves personality, not substance. The issue of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform, for instance, was settled seven years ago and no candidate wants to repeal the legislation. In other words, in terms of policy, there’s no difference at all between the candidates--- Romney doesn’t want to repeal the bill, and McCain doesn’t want to extend it.

Instead, McCain critics bring up the issue as a way of emphasizing their distaste for McCain’s “maverick” personality, his willingness to work with Democrats to achieve his policy goals. At the same time, they don’t acknowledge that on key goals that McCain, Romney and Huckabee share – like reforming Medicare and Social Security, for instance—no progress is vaguely possible without precisely that sort of cooperation with the leaders of the other party.

McCain’s personality remains a problem --- many conservatives find it insufferably obnoxious, some of us view it as candid and refreshing.

But on key issues, Republicans of 2008 face no wounds that can’t heal, no gaps that can’t be bridged.

If you doubt this proposition, think about the platform: there’s no real threat of a platform fight because McCain, Romney and Huckabee could all run with equal comfort and enthusiasm on a statement of plans and principles that proclaimed mainstream conservative values.

In the aftermath of Super-Duper Tuesday, with Mike Huckabee’s surprising success (predicted by this commentator, and almost no one else) should remind Republicans once again that there’s no big division on issues in this year’s GOP. Is Huckabee a stout-hearted Christian conservative who took conservative votes away from Romney, or a big government populist who took moderate votes from McCain, or a little bit of both who took votes from both? The fact that different commentators can make a convincing case for each of the three alternatives suggests that the renewed Huck-a-boom concerns style and personality (and peerless communication ability) far more than policy substance.

Despite the gloom in some circles at McCain’s coast-to-coast success in the February 5 primaries, even disaffected activists should take heart at the proper identification of this nomination contest. McCain should do whatever he can to emphasize that the struggle in which he looks increasingly like the victor was never about important differences on vital issues, but rather involved spirited debate as the right individual to implement the same approaches. All three candidates express similar conservative outlooks and should begin the process of working together after the conclusion of a tough fight that has been, after all, a heated but typical Personality Primary.