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There are two sets of rooting interests at this stage of any presidential campaign: Rooting for your candidate to win your party's nomination, and rooting for the "weakest" -- i.e., most beatable -- candidate to win the other party's nomination.

Andrew Sullivan picks up on another example of this this morning:

I, as an impure conservative, prefer the GOP to battle Clinton. Or at least I would like to see Obama take some hits before he wins the nomination. So a win for Hillary is a win for the GOP.

(Sigh.) I'm not naive; everybody wants to win, and everybody wants to advance their party's agenda ... because (hopefully) they believe it is the best agenda for the country.

Still, there's something unseemly about all of this. Putting party preferences aside, shouldn't we want the very best candidates to emerge from the primaries to slug it out for the fall?

In that spirit, here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to tell you who I hope would get the Republican nomination, based purely on who I think would do the best job.

First, though, who I want from the Democratic side: I'm leaning Obama, though I'm not 100 percent sold. I think Clinton does have more Washington experience, and I think that would be useful. But I think that while politics is the art of compromise, Clinton and her husband -- and she's citing her time with him in the White House as part of her experience -- have tended to compromise more than has been needed. Her vote in the Iraq invasion counts against her, in this case.

I think Obama's health care proposals could be stronger, but I think he's got the best combination of judgment and potential ability to get past a little of the gridlock to get things done. I don't think the gridlock will go away entirely, no matter his charms, though.

That said, the best Republican for the job. Just to be clear, I'm picking from the major candidates:

* Huckabee
* Giuliani
* McCain
* Romney

That's right, Ron Paul's off the list. Because he has no realistic chance of actually capturing the nomination.

I'm not opposed to people bringing their values to politics, but Mike Huckabee at times seems to have the pulpit and the bully pulpit confused. So no.

Giuliani. Relentlessly authoritarian. Doesn't know as much about foreign policy as he thinks he does. Has Norman Podhoretz on his panel of advisers, relentlessly urging him to bomb Iran. So on.

Republicans have spent the last three decades proving that a Massachusetts liberal can't win the presidency, so I'm amused they consider Romney -- who until the last 18 months, certainly seemed like one compared to the dominant GOP positions -- the establishment standard bearer. For all his flip-flopping, I'll take his word that he'll govern as the "double Guantanamo" guy. So no.

And that leaves me with McCain.

Understand, I don't want him to win the presidency. I think he's far too hawkish; I'm not interested in 100 years of Iraq.

But of all the Republicans with a chance, he's the one I think would be best for -- or, put another way, would do the least damage to -- the country. Like Huckabee, he's not a slave to the GOP establishment. Among the GOP contenders, he's made sense on immigration and refused to demagogue the issue. And though I'm not a fan of his support for the Iraq war, he at least made a compelling case -- earlier than most Republicans -- that it was being badly mismanaged, and tried to push President Bush into a smarter strategy.

Of course, this kind of talk is why a lot of Republicans don't like him much. So I'm probably not doing McCain any favors.

Who do you think is the best person among your party's opponents to lead the country?

UPDATE: And, oh yeah, he's better on the torture issue, too.