McCain's transcendent general-election challenge

NEW YORK CITY -- John McCain began Super Tuesday by planning a surge into the general election -- with exactly the same rhetoric he uses to talk about the other surge.

“We’re going to take the battle to the enemy,” he said at a morning rally at Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan.

He appeared to be referring to Democrats, who have claimed coastal strongholds fortified over years of presidential campaigns. In November, McCain intended to fight them there so he wouldn’t have to fight them here, or something like that: it was kind of a muddle before he launched into his usual “enemy” talk about the “transcendent challenge…against radical Islamic extremism.”

“As the nominee of the party, we’re going to go everywhere, we won’t write off anywhere,” McCain said, heartening a stage filled with local Republican politicos. McCain told them that Democratic control, even of one of the country’s most liberal zones, was in its last throes.

“I guarantee you as the nominee of my party I can and will carry the city of New York as well as the state of New York,” he declared.