So Much for a Warm Welcome

Conservatives have long memories, and plenty of what they recall is painful. In the last decade or so, McCain has sinned mightily against right-wing orthodoxy. He cosponsored the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which undermined a bedrock GOP belief that money is a form of free speech (and deprived conservative lobbying groups of influence); he joined the Senate's "Gang of 14," which forged a middle ground over the nomination of conservative judges, and he supported a compromise on illegal immigration. "McCain's apostasies are too numerous to count," wrote Krauthammer. "He's held the line on abortion, but on just about everything else he could find—tax cuts, immigration, campaign finance reform, Guantánamo—he not only opposed the conservative consensus but also insisted on doing so with ostentatious self-righteousness."

McCain's rise is the latest in a series of conservative disappointments (news that will surprise the many liberals who think the right has been running the country for seven years). "Conservatives are in open rebellion now," says longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie. "We've been treated shabbily by Republican establishment politicians. We've been treated like the proverbial country cousins. They'll invite us to the wedding but make us sit in the back. All that Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage and the others are doing is just reflecting what's happening at the grass roots. The Republican Party is in shambles. McCain is trailing among conservatives, and conservatives are the base of the Republican Party. Sure, he's getting the lion's share of moderate and liberal Republicans, but they make up only one third of the Republican vote."

No one knew this better than McCain himself as he strode to the podium of CPAC's annual meeting in the Omni Shoreham Hotel, a gathering that served as ground zero for the right-wing outrage last week. McCain had snubbed this convocation for years. But now the McCainiacs were growing worried that conservative Republicans would not rally on voting day and perhaps stay home. "The Republican Party needs to find its bottom," says conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck. "I'm an alcoholic. I understand what it means to bottom out. When you find your bottom—when you say, 'I can't live like this anymore, I can't live this lie'—that's when Republicans and conservatives will start doing some real soul-searching to determine what their values are."

McCain and his campaign know that the conservative uprising poses serious practical problems as well. A senior McCain aide, who didn't want to be named talking about the campaign's woes, cites the difficulty in fund-raising that the candidate faced a year ago when GOP critics targeted his compromise position on immigration reform. (McCain championed a bill with archliberal Ted Kennedy that would have allowed illegal aliens to participate in a worker-visa program. He later retreated.) Campaign donations quickly dried up—particularly among small donors, whose checks are looked upon as an indication of how much grass-roots support a candidate is getting. Aides privately worry that more barking from McCain's critics could create a similar scenario—a devastating financial blow in an election year when Republicans are already being outspent and outraised by Democrats. "We can get past people bashing us—even [George W.] Bush got some of that," says a McCain adviser, who declined to be named discussing internal strategy. "But if it starts affecting [the money], it's a problem." Coulter tells NEWSWEEK that she herself was "rather surprised at how ferocious and immediate the support was for my preference for Hillary over McCain on the Internet and in my In box. I thought it would take me a few more times at bat to explain my position fully. Oh no, no, no!"

It's no surprise, then, that McCain and his aides worked hard on his CPAC speech, in which he made the case that he was a "proud conservative" and was the only thing standing between conservatism and disaster. It was a direct appeal to the base. "I'm a Republican," McCain said six times in the speech, while his audience often sat on their hands. Despite polite cheers at the end, the crowd was unmoved. Matthew Bixler, a 22-year-old student at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, was one of those booing. "He was just playing to his audience," Bixler says, "talking about making tax cuts permanent that he didn't support in the first place. What kind of straight talk was that? I think he pandered to, if not even manipulated, this crowd." Justin Goins, 20, who also attends Liberty, says: "I just don't know how we could ever trust this man. Aside from being pro-life, he doesn't have much to go on in terms of how he's voted. How great is it that three different people had to come out before his speech and ask people not to boo?"

Still, the Omni Shoreham is not the Hanoi Hilton. John McCain is a man who has survived at least two near-death experiences: once as a prisoner in Vietnam, and a second time last summer, when he found himself abandoned and left for political dead by his party (before managing to revive his campaign almost single handedly). Last Thursday, McCain knew, it was not just he who was being cast aside. His right-wing critics were themselves getting dumped by his once bitter rival, Mitt Romney.