The Palmetto State of South Carolina lives in American history as the battlefield that ignited the revolution of the Confederacy against the Republican Party’s president at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, 1861. Now John McCain of Arizona, whose grandfather’s patrimony is from the Old South, aims to make the Palmetto State his battlefield to win the Republican Party nomination on his march to the White House in 2008.

Mr. McCain’s presidential ambition perished at South Carolina on February 19, 2000, when he was the target of an Orwellian-scale hate campaign vouchsafed by the Roveian forces of George Bush’s campaign. Mr. McCain had mauled Mr. Bush in the pell-mell New Hampshire primary on February 1. CNN reported a Time poll as late as February 5 that Mr. McCain had gone into a four-point lead in South Carolina, after being 20 points down, over Mr. Bush for the modified open primary. Karl Rove and his Iagos launched wave after wave of dirty tricks on all of the press in South Carolina, transforming the gregarious maverick John McCain into the anti-Christ. Church fliers called him “the fag candidate.”

Governor Bush supporters used the word “temper” repeatedly to paint the story that Mr. McCain’s prisoner of war years in the Hanoi Hilton, where he was tortured without breaking, had left him unstable. And one Bush supporter accused Mr. McCain of being the Manchurian candidate after being brainwashed by the North Vietnamese and recruited by the Russians.

The Bush campaign used push-polling, which asks deceitful questions, to distort Mr. McCain’s involvement with the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s. A Bob Jones University figure sent mass e-mails that Mr. McCain had fathered children “out of wedlock.” Most scurrilous, talk radio repeated accusations that John and Cindy McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was Mr. McCain’s illegitimate child from a prostitute, that Cindy McCain was a drug addict, and that Mr. McCain was a philandering closet homosexual as well as a KGB stooge.

The big lies worked when the McCain camp chose not to respond to the falsehoods: “I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land,” the senator declaimed. The day after Mr. Bush’s 11-point victory, Mr. McCain told the TV audience what he didn’t believe: “Well, my friends, you don’t have to win every skirmish to win a war or a crusade.”

Mr. McCain has learned from his past experiences and now has chosen to take all the roads, to win every skirmish, war, and crusade; to win everything from faxes to finances, and to make his South Carolina primary victory in February 2008 into the Appomattox Court House for the opposition.

Republican politics is first about the magic of liberty and second about the muscle of Mammon. Now South Carolina’s TheState.com reports that the McCain campaign already has the support of Senator Graham; the state’s attorney general, Henry McMaster, and the president pro tem of the state Senate, Glenn McConnell. Mr. McCain also has gained the support of the finance committee chairmen from the winning campaigns of Senators Graham and DeMint as well as of South Carolina’s recently re-elected governor, Mark Sanford. Moreover, the McCain campaign has recruited the critical Pioneer fund-raisers from the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

Especially potent former Bush supporters that are now McCain supporters are the chairman of the State Ports Authority, Bill Stern; a Bush fund-raiser and surgeon from Florence, Eddie Floyd; the venture capitalist and Bush fund-raiser, Larry Wilson, who is from the Midlands; and the Bush finance chairman of the 2000 Palmetto State campaign, the state’s ducal excommerce secretary and retired National Bank of South Carolina chairman, Bob Royall. “That is what I would call the A-Team,” the state’s GOP chairwoman, Kate Dawson, said. Mr. Royall’s firm verdict shows that Mr. McCain is now the orthodox choice: “I had to take three or four months to think about it. I weigh all the candidates in this stage of the game, and having been involved in the past and present administrations, I really think he’s the best person for the job.”

Five hundred seventy-three thousand South Carolinians voted in the GOP primary of February 2000, and Mr. McCain gained 239,964 votes even after all the smears thrown at him paid for by the money raised by Mr. Royall. This time, Mr. McCain chooses not to wait for those wintry weeks when the tide could turn on a slip or a chance between Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. This time, Mr. McCain means to possess all the powder, all the cannon, all the gunners and their apprentices before Messrs Giuliani and Romney or less well-known voices even take the field. This time, Mr. McCain understands that as South Carolina goes, so goes the Republican Party. So win big — Major-General Sherman-big — under the palmettos and live oaks of Charleston Harbor.

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