So Much for a Warm Welcome

Now McCain is "unwilling to bow and kiss the ring" of his antagonists, says one adviser, who didn't want to be named fanning any flames. (Regarding Coulter, another top McCain aide snorts—anonymously, for the same reason—"I don't care what she thinks.") Do their diatribes bother McCain? "I don't listen to them … I've never even met them," McCain says. "I don't even listen to Rush … I'm not a masochist." Asked if it wouldn't make his life simpler to call Dobson and seek common ground, McCain shrugs. "I know what it takes to unite the party," he says. He needs to put that knowledge into action, and fairly soon. It seems possible that the conservative movement—the dominant force in American politics since the Reagan Revolution—has become so dogmatic that it might choose purity over victory.

Conservatives have been here before. Twenty years ago, in 1988, they ultimately coalesced behind George H.W. Bush, who had run as a moderate in 1980 before moving rightward as vice president. Hard-core conservatives were never entirely comfortable with the senior Bush, but, presented with the possibility of a Michael Dukakis presidency, the activists chose to believe that Bush's conservatism was real. The question for them now is whether they will go to McCain's side as they did to Bush's in 1988. (By 1992, the right—including, for a time, Limbaugh—had grown unhappy with Bush, which hurt him in his failed re-election bid, first in the primaries against Pat Buchanan and then in the general against Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.) According to surveys, McCain is competitive in head-to-head match-ups with Clinton and Obama, largely because he appeals to conservative Democrats and independents. Part of his pitch is that he can "reach out" (a phrase that Limbaugh, on his show last week, repeated disgustedly, imitating McCain's voice). Yet Democrats seem far more determined than Republicans to vote this year. They've turned out for primary and caucus voting in far greater numbers, and the new NEWSWEEK Poll shows less enthusiasm among Republican voters for McCain than there is among Democratic voters for Obama and Clinton. McCain can ill afford to continue to alienate an influential chunk of the Republican base if he wants to win. For now, he seems to be depending on aides to mend fences: respected conservatives such as Charlie Black, a former Reagan adviser, are quietly reaching out to critics. He's also counting on some of the anger to be diverted as the campaign shifts toward a battle with the Democrats.

McCain may, in fact, have a better sense of America's shifting political mood than his detractors. "More and more of us are independents," says pollster John Zogby. "More people are not wedded to a party, a candidate or an ideology." Michael Dimock of the Pew Research Center says poll numbers show a small shift away from the GOP. About 34 percent of registered voters identified themselves as independents in 2007, up from about 30 percent in 2006, he says. That's the highest it's been since 1999, and almost all the slippage has been on the Republican side. Many in the Republican Party base, meanwhile, seem to believe it's still the same country it was a political generation ago—their country, in other words. "Conservatives are on the eternal search for a new Reagan," columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post last Friday. "They refuse to accept that a movement leader who is also a gifted politician is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon."

The senator's persona is bound up in his ethos of defiance and courage—the witty raconteur of the Straight Talk Express whose penchant for getting in the face of his critics dates back to his days as an antic troublemaker at the Naval Academy. Before his speech last Thursday to the Conservative Political Action Committee in Washington, D.C., McCain told NEWSWEEK that he knew he'd probably be booed. (The admission came with a smile.) Privately, his aides worried about a full-scale walkout from the giant ballroom—or, even worse, people throwing things at the stage. "Tomatoes we are good with," said one McCain adviser, who didn't want to be named making light of a tense situation. "Rocks … not so much. Hopefully, they'll pat those folks down." There were no projectiles, but plenty of hoots, especially when McCain admitted he'd "made mistakes."

The hoots could be a problem. Coulter has a devoted readership, and Limbaugh and his peers have huge, loyal audiences (nearly 14 million at last count for Limbaugh), because they are saying things many conservative Americans want to hear. Gary Bauer, president of American Values, says: "Conservatives have been in a funk for a couple of years now for a variety of reasons, including disappointment over the 2006 elections. But the movement is alive and well, and I, for one, think the best days for conservatives are still ahead. Our philosophy is in tune with most Americans. It's significant that every candidate was trying to outdo the others in appealing to conservative voters." Lee Edwards, a Heritage Foundation historian who studies the conservative movement, agrees. "Most voters still support a limited government, a strong national defense and basic conservative ideas," he says. The reason the Republican nominee this year wasn't more conservative, he believes, is not a reflection of a move to the middle, but the lack of a strong and viable leader of that ilk: Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson were all fatally flawed.

In retrospect, McCain may have been saved by his campaign meltdown last summer, says Grover Norquist, another prominent conservative activist and president of Americans for Tax Reform. "Had he stayed the front runner, the talk-show hosts would have had the opportunity to make a case against him," Norquist says. But they didn't realize he was making a comeback until New Hampshire and South Carolina, and "by the time they tried to make a case, it was too late."