Costa Mesa Unplugged:

You know a political party is in trouble when the candidate anointed by the party’s long-established power structure loses a presidential primary to a maverick in the family. And, worse, loses to that infernal black sheep in a region known to be the power source of the party’s national lighthouse.

In this instance, it’s the Republican Party that’s listing. It’s sailing for ice. And there are lifeboats in the water. I’m in one of them.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain is a maverick. An independent thinker. A practical conservative who recognizes there’s some gray in the course of human events that’s not easily hued to black or white by the rigid conservative thinking of flat-Earth ideologues.

So you would think McCain would have had his backside handed to him here in Orange County. Here in the fertile crescent of Ronald Reagan conservatism and the birthplace of Richard Nixon. Here in the cradle of lapel pins, strict constructionists, blue blazers and creationism-as-science peddling.

But that’s not what happened in the Feb. 5 primary. McCain carried Orange County. He beat Mitt Romney, the prom king of the party’s arch conservative pit bosses. And it was Romney who subsequently left the race, his backside in tow.

Romney’s defeat made his withdrawl a certainty. I mean, if you can’t carry the vote in your party’s home fort, it’s probably not safe to brave the electoral wilderness with any hope of coming back alive. Or with your scalp intact, at least.

That McCain has the Orange County trophy on his mantle — and the nomination ready for skinning — should shock no one except those blindly faithed to the notion that unequivocal conservatism is some sort of super plasma immune to the forces that spawn social, cultural and economic watersheds.

A watershed is upon us. The American psyche — still reeling from the stunning horror that extreme ideologies and fanaticism are capable of — is madly rushing to the political middle from both sides.

Doubt it?

Well, Barack Obama — a Democrat — dished a little homage to Reagan for “changing the trajectory of America” and for putting the country on a “fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” Nevertheless, he’s the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.