The Wall Street Journal-20080206-Campaign -08- Will McCain Make Nice to the Right-- Speech to Conservatives Could Make or Break Ties With Republican Activists

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Campaign '08: Will McCain Make Nice to the Right?; Speech to Conservatives Could Make or Break Ties With Republican Activists

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The next big hurdle for John McCain isn't the Feb. 12 primaries. It's his appearance tomorrow before the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, whose verdict on the Arizona senator could make or break his presidential aspirations.

The 6,000 Republican Party members expected to attend "are the ground troops that make up the conservative base," says David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union, which sponsors the yearly meeting. "And he's pretty much blown his credibility with these people."

CPAC has been an important stop on conservatives' calendars since Ronald Reagan showed up in 1973 for the first of 17 appearances. The three-day conference in Washington now draws thousands of people, more than half of them under age 26, who come to listen to the movement's stars and assess its presidential candidates.

Last year, Sen. McCain was the only declared candidate to turn down an invitation to speak to the group, which returned the snub by consigning him to fifth place in a presidential straw poll, well behind first-place finisher Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and Sen. McCain's rival for the Republican nomination.

Sen. McCain this year answered his CPAC invitation only after winning the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 8 and settled on a time only after his South Carolina win on Jan. 26. He will follow both Vice President Dick Cheney and Mr. Romney, plus a panel that ponders the question, "Is the GOP Still Lost?"

Sen. McCain has long been famously at odds with his party's right wing, which raises the stakes for his CPAC appearance. Some conservative commentators including Rush Limbaugh and national Evangelical Christian leaders have said they won't endorse Mr. McCain. In a transcript of a radio interview provided by the Romney campaign yesterday, James Dobson of Focus on the Family said Sen. McCain "is not a conservative, and in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are."

A boffo performance could energize CPAC's activists, who pay to attend the conference and in return are invited to workshops on such topics as fund-raising appearances and career planning.

"If 6,000 people walk out of that room excited, that's important; you can't buy that," says Grover Norquist, a regular CPAC panelist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative advocacy group.

But a speech by Sen. McCain that fails to convince the audience that he will champion a conservative agenda if chosen the party's nominee could feed calls by some commentators to stay home on Election Day.

"You've got a lot of people who say conservative principles are bigger than electing a president," says Alfred Regnery, publisher of the conservative American Spectator magazine. Among that crowd, Sen. McCain "could make things a lot better for himself, or he could make things a lot worse," Mr. Regnery said.

Conservatives say Sen. McCain must offer a speech that lays out a conservative philosophy on everything from tax cuts to the appointment of judges. Conservatives aren't likely to forgive him for leading the push for campaign-finance laws and a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants.

But Sen. McCain shares conservatives' ideas on the Iraq war and abortion, which are intensely important to the Republican base. A strong statement on spending -- something that "makes it explicit he's not going to go along" with President Bush's $3.1 trillion 2009 budget -- also would be popular, Mr. Regnery says.

Sen. McCain's problem is that he owes much of his early-primary success to independents and moderate Republicans, and he will be dependent on those voters again if he is the party's nominee. In early exit polls in New York yesterday, 46% of Republicans who described themselves as conservatives gave their votes to Sen. McCain, while 61% who called themselves moderate favored the senator.

So far, those moderate voters haven't held Sen. McCain's conservative views against him. In the early New York exit polls, 56% of voters who said abortion should be legal and 45% who said the Iraq war is the country's biggest problem voted for Sen. McCain.

Sen. McCain's election chances would plummet if those moderate and liberal voters switch to the Democratic nominee in November. But they also would be sorely damaged if conservative activists stay home. Moderates and independent voters "aren't the kind of people who walk precincts" on a candidate's behalf, Mr. Norquist says.