US:CHRIS POHL came to the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington to peddle hats. As political gimmicks go, it was ingenious: a Russian ushanka, complete with fur ear flaps, stamped with a red hammer and sickle and interchangeable name tags - Hillary '08 or Obama '08. Twenty-five dollars.
He was certainly in the right market: CPAC is the pre-eminent yearly gathering of conservative activists. Here they embraced the hats' message that electing either Clinton or Obama would be like putting Lenin in the White House.
But it occurred to Pohl that the hat was really a general election prop, and conservatives are not yet ready to start the general election. Their own party's presumptive nominee, Senator John McCain, is not their kind.
Many don't like him, don't trust him, hate his cosiness with the media, and worry that, once elected, he'll compromise with Democrats. Too much straight talk, not enough street fighter.
"That's why my hat's a little ahead of its time," Pohl lamented.
In the nearly three weeks since McCain himself was both booed and cheered at CPAC, his team has been ringing round trying to quell the unhappy roar within the Republican Party base. But nothing has worked. Even the New York Times suggesting an affair between the senator and a lobbyist only rallied them briefly.
David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, a CPAC co-sponsor, warns that "if he really wants an enthusiastic base in the fall, he is going to have to do more than sit there and hope that it comes to him." Keene was one of those who got a call.
The pitch, Keene says: loyalty demands that all wings of the party come together in the interest of retaining the White House. Unconvincing, Keene says.
"Part of the problem he has on the right is traceable to the attitudes he has expressed over the years toward conservatives, which have led to a queasy feeling on their part," Keene argues.
"I have seen no real evidence of an attempt to find out what the real differences are and try to bridge the gap."
But McCain strategist Charlie Black points to polls that show his candidate getting 85 per cent of the Republican vote against either Democrat. "We don't have a huge problem at the voter level," he says. Yet in 24 primaries and caucuses, McCain never once carried voters who identified themselves as "very conservative", exit polls showed. And in a majority of the Republican nominating contests, those voters represented a third or more of the total voter turnout.
Tony Blankley, once press secretary to former House speaker Newt Gingrich, wrote pointedly in the conservative publication Human Events: "It would be the first time in living memory that a Republican presidential nomination went to a candidate who was not merely opposed by a majority of the party, but was actively despised by about half its rank-and-file voters."
The case against McCain has a number of specific counts - his Senate compromise on immigration, his vote against tax cuts, his co-sponsorship of campaign finance reform, and his position on global warming.
"John McCain gives the impression that he needs the conservatives to come to him," said Bay Buchanan, a conservative activist. "Basically, we've been abused for a dozen years here, and he . . . expects us to get in line. He has to give us a reason to vote for him."
This sense of beleaguerment is a familiar conservative posture. This is the wing that believes it built the modern Republican Party, that licked the stamps, that hands out fliers outside churches and provides much of the energy in national elections. It likes its candidates to pledge fealty.
As some strategists see it, the question is not about McCain getting the support of conservatives over Obama. It is can he win their hearts so that they will battle for him? Conservative consultant Greg Mueller argues that he needs "the entire apparatus involved. I have never heard of an independent activist, have you? I have heard of a conservative activist. We need them to get the vote out".
Historian Lee Edwards maintains that conservatives often threaten, but normally come round. In 1976, he said, they preferred Ronald Reagan but ended up behind Gerald Ford, who lost to Jimmy Carter.
In 1988, they were lukewarm about George Bush, but the prospect of a Michael Dukakis presidency was even more revolting. In 2000, George Bush jnr was hardly seen as a perfect conservative, but the idea of Al Gore couldn't be stomached.
Michigan Republican chairman Saul Anuzis doesn't believe in self-inflicted pain. "In the end, for conservatives, this is going to be a very simple choice. I think you will see a coalescence of the party behind McCain."