The Republican presidential race has narrowed to three candidates — John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Ron Paul. Of the three, McCain holds what appears to be an almost insurmountable lead in the delegate count.

The ascendancy of McCain would have been hard to imagine last fall, when the pundits were claiming his campaign was all but dead. Then McCain won the nation’s first primary in New Hampshire, and the momentum he gained there helped him win elsewhere. But would McCain be able to win in November, should he become the GOP’s standard-bearer? Many Republican voters undoubtedly think he can. Yet McCain’s stance on the Iraq War presents him with a challenging hurdle. McCain not only supports the war, he is on record as saying that we did the right thing by attacking Iraq in the first place, and that he would be fine with keeping the troops there for 100 years. The American people, recall, gave the Democrats majority control of both houses of Congress in 2006 because of their growing disagreement with President Bush’s Iraq War policy.

It is ironic that according to the exit polling in New Hampshire, McCain got a higher percentage of the vote from Republican voters who disapprove of the Iraq War than he did from those who approve of the war. Many of the voters who disapprove of the war were undoubtedly uninformed, but many of them may have voted for McCain despite his position on the war — because they view him as “electable.” The question is: would the American people as a whole be willing to do the same thing?

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