This is from Truthdig, which links to a story from the New York Post:
Rush Limbaugh’s said it, and now Charles Hurt from Rupert Murdoch’s Big Apple tabloid, the New York Post, is joining in the chorus of conservatives who worry that Sen. John McCain would betray the GOP’s core right-wing base if he inches any closer to the White House.
The Post story — more of an analysis column — raises echoes of the 1972 election, when the Democratic establishment decided that it would be better to fracture the party than turn it over to McGovern and the antiwar crowd. That decision — at a time when the party already was losing steam and the conservative movement was beginning its ascendance, has proven to have a longterm impact as the right continued to grow in strength.
Now, the conservative establishment is in decline and its leaders — and media mouthpieces — are taking aim at McCain, an apostate conservative in their eyes (never mind that most of his positions are indistinguishable from those held by President George W. Bush).
Hurt quotes Limbaugh:
If the Republican Party expands “because we have a candidate who’s going out trying to attract liberals by being like them, then the party’s going to be around but you won’t recognize it,” thundered radio king Rush Limbaugh.
The Republican Party will “be over as it exists now,” he warns.
Hurt then makes the McGovern comparison more explicit (though he doesn’t acknowledge it):
Still, McCain has so radicalized key conservatives that some have vowed to turn themselves into suicide voters next November by pulling the lever for Hillary Rodham Clinton over him.
This last-minute blitz against McCain by Limbaugh and others, however, comes far too late.
But if those conservatives sit out the general election, they will help Democrats make history by electing either the first black president or the first female president next November.
I doubt we will see a full-out assault on the presumptive Republican nominee, as we did in 1972 when the Democratic establishment pulled out the stops in an effort to nominate anybody buy McGovern, a campaign that sucked the wind from McGovern’s sails (he had faced a steep uphill climb against a sitting president with decent approval ratings already) — and fractured the party at a time when it already had become dangerously fragile.
What followed was the moderately paced erosion of the Democratic Party, both institutionally and philosophically. The Clinton presidency, in some ways, was a blip caused by the first George Bush’s disastrous handling of a recession, a blip that obscured the fact that the 1990s ended with Republican control of the House of Representatives, the election of George W. Bush and the further movement of our national government to the right.
The conditions on the right and in the Republican Party are similar, to some degree, to those faced in 1972 by the Democrats. Perhaps, Limbaugh is right (yes, I did just write that). Perhaps, McCain will lead the national GOP into the wilderness, after all, which would not be such a bad thing for the future of the country.
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Hank Kalet 