GOP emotions running high

WASHINGTON -- The caller could barely contain his anger. ''Who appointed McCain to be head of the Republican Party?" he asked.

''The media," responded conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham.

''My blood is boiling," the caller replied.

The agreement hatched Monday night by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and his bipartisan band of moderates to avert a showdown over judicial nominations reverberated yesterday through the echo chamber of Republican primary politics.

On conservative talk radio, blogs, and citizen-group websites, emotions ran high over two prospective presidential candidates. Toward McCain, no friend of the right, the emotion was anger. Toward Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, who is a friend, it was disappointment.

''We had a failure of leadership," Ingraham said in a swipe at Frist. ''And when that happens, someone like McCain can drive a truck right through it."

For at least a decade, the political right has dominated Republican primaries, making it difficult for moderates such as McCain to emerge as the party's nominee for president. But with the Monday night agreement, greeted with dismay by interest groups on both the left and the right, the Arizona senator threw down an early gauntlet, openly defying the party's conservative base.

''We had McCain-Feingold," said talk show host Rush Limbaugh in a reference to the senator's signature campaign finance law, widely denounced by the right. ''This is McCain-the middle finger."

There has been no love lost between McCain and the conservative movement since his failed 2000 presidential campaign bid, when he traveled to Virginia Beach, home of Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, and assailed Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and other evangelical leaders for ''turning good causes into businesses." He also accused them of distorting his Senate record because he refused to ''pander" to their followers.

Commentators such as Limbaugh never forgave McCain for pursuing campaign finance reform, which they say led to the rise of big-money independent expenditures on the left.

But even by those standards, the vitriol over McCain's role in the judicial deal is fierce, a political fact of life that doesn't seem to bother the McCain camp.

''The strategy all along is to transcend the swamp fever of the right, and build a different kind of coalition -- with fiscal conservatives, national defense hawks, and moderates who are discomfited by the influence of the religious right," said Marshall Wittmann, a former top McCain aide and onetime legislative director for the Christian Coalition.

McCain now sees an opening for Republican moderates, Wittmann noted, because of the Terri Schiavo episode, in which Bush and congressional leaders tried to intercede to restore the feeding tube of a brain-damaged woman, while most Republican voters opposed the move. McCain publicly fretted that Congress was turning a ''human tragedy" into a ''political issue."

Wittmann also cited the splits between religious conservatives and moderates such as McCain over stem cell research and a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Frist, another probable presidential candidate, instead chose to use the judicial nomination battle to cement his initially tenuous standing with religious conservatives. He appeared on a Christian right video urging an up-or-down vote on President Bush's judicial nominees, and comforted conservative allies with assurances that he would not accept a deal that enabled Democrats to block by filibuster any nominees to the bench.

On Monday night, Frist conceded there was some disappointing news in the deal brokered by moderates without his input. And by yesterday, his star seemed to have faded with conservative commentators. The Concerned Women for America complained about ''a foolish deal" that had left the Senate Republican leader ''holding an empty hand."

McCain and Frist weren't the only ones targeted by the Republican right yesterday: So was Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a critical latecomer to the negotiations for a deal. ''If Lindsey Graham or any of these guys want to be the nominee of the party -- they can forget it," said Limbaugh.