I wish McCain would reach out to him, just to watch the left pivot instantly from heralding Paul as America’s only principled conservative to denouncing him as a neo-confederate white supremacist, the better to build their case that McCain is secretly a Klansman or whatever. Dial him up, Maverick. Tell him you’ve got a hot lead on thermite that his “followers” might be interested in.

Ron Paul says the legions of newcomers his presidential campaign brought to the Republican Party are getting the cold shoulder from John McCain and from the party…

“I don’t think they want them,” Mr. Paul told The Washington Times, adding that indifference doesn’t surprise him because the party’s establishment has deserted traditional conservative principles for big government and foreign intervention.

“We don’t agree with them,” he says. “We agree with the Old Right, and they’re the New Right, which is ‘The Wrong,’ [because] the New Right has morphed into neoconservative.”..

Mr. McCain hasn’t approached Mr. Paul’s voters because Mr. Paul has not called to say he is ending his run, says McCain campaign senior adviser Charles Black…

[Paul] won’t support Mr. McCain “unless he changes — bring the troops home, believe in the gold standard, reject all the votes he ever had for all his entitlement spending. He needs to come back to the roots of the Republican Party.”

Sounds like fertile ground for a compromise. Question: What could McCain possibly have to say to the Paulnuts? There’s a future for libertarianism (hopefully) within the party with respect to domestic issues but absent some dramatic shifts you’re not going to see mainstream Republicans defecting en masse to an early 1930s form of foreign policy isolationism. In fact, my sense is that Paul’s supporters are even more avidly anti-intervention than he is: He did, after all, vote for war in Afghanistan, a detail not often mentioned amid his many indictments of “empire” and force-projection. If we’re hit again by Al Qaeda, will he support some sort of operation in the Pakistani tribal areas? Doubtful, but maybe. Will the Paulnuts? Almost certainly not. What’s left to talk about, except maybe to tell them that if they’re thinking of organizing any terrorist-themed fundraisers for him, thanks but no thanks?