Victor Davis Hanson, in wondering why the GOP is so eager to lose the election just when the Democats have given them a way to win it, makes some good points about why John McCain is a conservative in the Reagan mold.

Despite McCain’s 82-percent career ranking by the American Conservative Union, and his support for balanced budgets, an end to pork-barrel spending and earmarks, strong support for the war, and expressed regret over once supporting the Bush illegal immigration reform package, McCain was branded by the conservative media as a sellout and a near liberal. Not to mention that he was supposedly too old and hot-tempered to be the Republican nominee. The more McCain was discovered not to be a perfect conservative, the more he was accused of not even being a good one.Even stranger, the various Republican candidates began invoking Ronald Reagan’s three-decade-old tenure as the new litmus test of the times — apparently to show how moderates like the wayward McCain fell far short of the Gipper’s true-blue conservatism.Were conservatives supposed to forget that a maverick Reagan raised some taxes, signed an illegal-alien amnesty bill, expanded government, appointed centrist Supreme Court justices, advocated nuclear disarmament, sold arms to Iran, and pulled out of Lebanon — but to remember only that John McCain was not for the original Bush tax cuts or once supported the administration’s offer of a quasi-amnesty?The Democratic cat-fighters are doing their best to give away a once-sure general election, but the Republicans seem to be doing even more to ensure that they forfeit the unexpected gift they’ve been given.

Read the whole thing.

Michael Barone has some thoughts on the campaign so far, and why he thinks Republicans will unite (which fits the historical pattern) and Democrats will divide (which also fits the historical pattern...as Will Rogers once said, "I don't belong to any organized political party...I'm a Democrat").

John DiStaso also has some thoughts on why failures in New Hampshire led to the implosion of the Giuliani campaign.

Meanwhile, the New York Times may have dropped the biggest bomb on the Clinton campaign today with this story about the shady dealings between a millionaire Canadian businessman and Bill Clinton. Democratic primary voters take notice. Obama's relationship with a shady Chicago businessman is small potatoes by comparison.