So Much for a Warm Welcome

Ann Coulter has made controversy her currency, outrage her oeuvre. And a lot of currency it is: over the past decade, Coulter's earned a huge amount of money from an unbroken streak of six best sellers, each an angry diatribe against liberals, most featuring her slim blond figure on the cover. Coulter Inc. has helped inspire a cottage industry of imitators, books that all seem designed to feed off the frustrations of the angry right. ("Liberal Fascism," by Jonah Goldberg, is the latest to hit it big.) But Coulter has a subspecialty all her own: uttering remarks so off the charts, so contrary to every norm of civil discourse, that they attract national news coverage. A few months ago she declared on TV that Jews need "to be perfected," and suggested that America would be better off if it were all Christian. Last week Coulter attacked her own party's presumptive nominee. John McCain, Coulter said, was a traitor to conservatives, so much so that she'd campaign for Hillary Clinton if he were nominated. Was there anything the Arizona senator could do, NEWSWEEK e-mailed her later, to change her mind? Would she really stump for Clinton? "I don't know," she wrote. Then she added: "McCain could invent a time machine, travel back in time" and take back all his liberal-leaning votes in Congress. "Short of that," she said, "the only thing that would work is if he put a gun to my head, but since McCain is also against gun rights, that's out." (McCain backed a measure to close a gun-show loophole on background checks, but is otherwise supportive of gun rights.)

As McCain draws closer to the GOP nomination, many leaders of the conservative movement have gone into convulsions. The biggest headline-grabber was Coulter, who, true to form, seemed to set a new low for immoderation. But that didn't stop a slew of other prominent hard-right pundits, most on talk radio, from trying to outrant her. Rush Limbaugh, the most popular right-wing radio host, had been railing against McCain for years, and now declared that if he were nominated, "it's going to destroy the Republican Party." "He's just a lousy senator and a terrible Republican," said Hugh Hewitt, another syndicated talk-show host. "His votes the past seven to 10 years have been on the wrong side of the issues." The revolt went beyond talk radio's political shock jocks. James Dobson, one of the nation's most prominent evangelical Christian leaders, declared he could not "in good conscience" vote for McCain and endorsed Mike Huckabee—the first time Dobson had ever taken sides in a GOP primary.

Other right-wing pundits counterattacked in what has become a case of a party's base bringing chaos out of order. Bill Bennett, the onetime drug czar and conservative Washington pundit who now has his own show, asked his fellow radio hosts to tone things down. "Who is he to say that?" retorted one of them, Michael Savage, who sometimes rivals Coulter in controversy. "He's got a minuscule audience and no credibility. If he wants to start some internecine war, then here we go: he's a blowhard." The uncivil war also pulled in some stalwarts of the GOP "base," such as Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. "Rush is even ranting against me," Land tells NEWSWEEK. "I had the temerity to challenge the Great One in his all-knowing wisdom. Rush is underestimating the ability of Hillary or [Barack] Obama to unite conservatives around McCain. Rush says on air, 'Dr. Land, I'll tell you, I talk to 20 million people a day.' No he doesn't. He talks at 20 million people a day." (Limbaugh declined NEWSWEEK's interview request.) Does the Limbaughian view matter, really? The numbers suggest an apparent gap between the movement's leaders and rank-and-file conservatives. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, McCain holds a marginal lead among conservatives (49 to 43 percent) in a showdown with Huckabee. Seventy-six percent of all GOP voters and 69 percent of self-described conservatives say they would be satisfied with McCain as the GOP nominee. However, on Saturday, the first test since McCain became the presumptive nominee, Huckabee trounced McCain in the Kansas caucus, winning around 60 percent of the vote.

As the country learned anew in 2000 and 2004, every vote counts—especially every vote in states (like Ohio) where the margin of victory in a general election is likely to be narrow. If even a handful of conservatives were to follow the Limbaugh-Coulter line and stay home, it could make a real difference. McCain knows that, which is why he is moving to address the trouble to his right. Sens. Tom Coburn and Sam Brownback, widely respected among right-to-lifers, have been contacting prominent social conservatives, including many members of Congress, urging them to take a second look at McCain's record. Former vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp, a hero to fiscal conservatives and a frequent guest on Limbaugh's show, tells NEWSWEEK he "just finished a first draft of an open letter to Sean [Hannity] and Rush and Laura [Ingraham] and the other conservative talk-show hosts." Former senator Phil Gramm has been tasked with reaching out to lawmakers, as well as activists in the conservative movement. A senior McCain adviser, who didn't want to be named discussing internal strategy, says that Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of McCain's closest allies in the Senate, made a direct appeal last week to Hannity, the radio and TV host, who has railed against McCain in recent weeks. Meanwhile, that McCain adviser, and another who didn't want to be named for the same reason, confirm to NEWSWEEK that there has been tentative outreach to Limbaugh—though McCain himself has not been directly involved in that effort.

Reaching out, though, is not pandering. McCain tried that once, and it didn't work; he does not want to try it again. In 2000, he avoided hard questions about whether South Carolinians could fly the Confederate flag over their statehouse by invoking "states' rights"—an approach that backfired when George W. Bush won the primary. (He later reversed himself, saying his earlier decision had been motivated by politics.) He tried early in this campaign to make nice with social conservatives by reaching out to prominent evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell, whom he'd called "agents of intolerance." But his wooing of the right alienated independents and moderates who liked his straight-talk image. By July, his campaign was virtually broke and his candidacy was written off.