The Mouths That Run Against McCain

But the talkers get under McCain's skin, as when former senator Rick Santorum, who used Ingraham's radio show to endorse Romney, questioned McCain's "temperament" and referred to the "Twisted Talk Express."

"I guess he's found out something about me since he lost the election which he was unaware of when he was desperately seeking me to go to Pennsylvania to campaign for him," McCain theorized.

Campaigning in Boston on Monday morning, he offered nothing to social conservatives in his stump speech. Sounding much like a candidate who has already locked up the nomination, he stuck to security and the economy.

"As president of the United States, I will preserve my proud conservative Republican credentials, but I will reach across the aisle to the Democrats and work together for the good of the country," he said, to sustained applause from the crowd in Faneuil Hall. Beneath a portrait of Daniel Webster and John Adams, he introduced a disaffected Democratic supporter, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Before he finished his speech, he raised another heresy: the scandals and "evil" that put Republican former congressmen Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney in prison. McCain used a question-and-answer session after the speech to take a shot at President Bush's new $3 trillion budget proposal. "We lost the 2006 election because of spending," he said. "It dispirited our base, spending got completely out of control, it led to corruption."

But another question, about the "hard-core conservatives who are apparently getting nervous about your potential win," brought McCain back to his battle with the Limbaugh base. "Compare our records," he said, reciting complaints about Romney's profligacy.

The questions about McCain's rift with conservatives continued later, aboard the candidate's bus in New Jersey, when he talked about his plans to address the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday. "I hope I can remind them of my strong conservative principles," he said.

Complicating that effort, however, was the presence on the bus of Rudy Giuliani, an unabashed moderate on social issues, who piped up about McCain's crossover appeal. "John reaches out to independents probably as strongly as any Republican," he said of his former presidential rival.

That, of course, is just what the Limbaugh lobby is afraid of. And McCain knows he has a lot of work to do to win over the talk-show crowd. "I don't underestimate the challenge of uniting our party," he said. On that, even Coulter would have to agree.