This morning’s Washington Post front pager on John McCain offers a chorus of conservative voices vowing war over changes they expect the presumptive Republican nominee to attempt to engineer in the GOP platform.
The one conservative urging calm? The Family Research Council’s Ken Blackwell:

Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and a former Ohio secretary of state, said he does not expect a “bloodletting” in the platform committee. He predicts that conservatives and McCain will be reasonable and stay focused on a November victory: “I don’t think you are going to see any radical departures or inflammatory demands for change in one direction or another.”

Could this mean the McCain camp has been making assurances to the Family Research Council on the social issues (abortion, gay rights, stem cell research) most important to the Christian Right? It wasn’t too long ago that FRC was making noises (to God-o-Meter) about the need for McCain to assure social conservatives that it wouldn’t attempt to tweak the Republican platform’s pro-life language.

5