John McCain of Arizona has won the Anybody-But role for the Republican nomination in 2008. Is this good or bad news for Team McCain? It is a tradition in the Grand Old Party that choosing a nominee, especially to succeed a sitting Republican president, means that the party must perform a romantic opera that requires certain roles to be filled by credible performers. The lead role is that of Anybody But, which the 2008 election has now filled. Equally critical is the role of Who-Can-Stop-Him? which is filled this year with a lean, hungry triumvirate of Rudy Giuliani of New York, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, and Bill Frist of Tennessee. The junior roles are called What-Abouts? which best have a regional balance: George Pataki of New York, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Dick Armey of Texas, and Condoleeza Rice of California.

Republican history suggests that the Anybody-But role will be the nominee — from Blaine in 1884 to Taft in 1908, Nixon in 1960, and Mr. Bush in 1988 — and that all of the booms for the competing candidates know this as they plunge into the contest. No blame attaches to supporting a Who Can Stopper or a What Abouter, since the party expects you will eventually join the Anybody Buts. The Republican Party is the most successful third party in history just because it understands and enjoys these periodic tantrums in which the party faithful scrap with each other far more passionately than with the eventual Democratic opponent. The Republicans call them contests of ideas, but this is self-admiration, because there is only one idea in the Republican Party — liberty — and no party member is more equal in that debate. The tantrums are best seen as routine Big Manhood: Choose your Big Man and fight to control the party’s money, which is the same as controlling the party.

Even though Team McCain is in the commanding position of being the Anybody Buts, this does not mean that the opera will go well for John McCain or that he will win the White House. In fact, the record warns otherwise: Blaine and Nixon lost expensive, nasty elections — Blaine to the late smear of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion”; Nixon to the Daley grave-voting machine in Illinois and the Brown Chicano-voting machine in South Texas. And Taft in 1908 and Mr. Bush in 1988 survived the party’s contretemps, but the struggle made them vulnerable to revolts that wrecked their re-elections, Taft to the Bull Moosers in 1912, and Mr. Bush to the Perotistas in 1992.

For now, with 23 months till the Republican National Convention, with the leading roles cast, it is fun to watch my party warm up as the chorus for the opera named “Road to the White House, 2008.” With the overture soon closing the 2006 midterms, we are about to begin the first act, called “The Whispering Campaign.” Already on stage you can see the head-nodding, pretzel-shaping, furrowed-brow singers presenting the hot rumor that Mr. McCain is the Manchurian Candidate for Real. The clinical details are usefully fuzzy, but apparently Mr. McCain will inform any moment with the Hanoi Hilton programming of being the son and grandson of an admiral as well as a torture victim and cancer victim. “The Whispering Campaign” has a barbarous chant that goes, “Even Rudy, nuts as he is, is better than McCain, who is craaaaazy; and who cares if he can beat Hillary, McCain is a jihad-wack-job.”

The second act, which begins in late 2007, is titled “Stop McCain” and will leave no stone unturned or un-thrown. It will center on the person President Bush thinks is his true successor; and because the president (after Reagan, after Ike) will not comment until after the convention, if at all, there will be opportunity for anonymous wags to read entrails. The final act is for mid-2008, titled “I’ll Sit at Home” and will feature stalwarts with grieving visages crooning funeral odes that mention Hillary and Bill Clinton as foils and claim that self-exile in Moscow is preferable to voting to put the country in the hands of the False Pachyderm McCain.

Today, as preparation for the opera ahead, I have started a five-question survey. There are no wrong answers, and remember this is for True Pachyderms Only.

1. John McCain supports President Bush’s Global War on Terror because (a) he is the most combat-tested presidential candidate since Grant, (b) he just says these things: his conduct in the Senate is closer to that of Democrats like Senator Lieberman or Senator Schumer, (c) he is following Nixon’s advice to run to the right for the primaries, or (d) he has made a secret deal with the Democrats to support them in 2008 in exchange for the vice presidency.

2. To be continued.

Mr. Batchelor is host of the “John Batchelor Show,” now on hiatus.