With the leading candidates failing to unite the faithful, America�s republicans are in turmoil as the battle for the presidential nomination reaches a crucial stage
by Andrew Purcell in New York

AT the most recent Republican debate, on Thursday night, the five remaining contenders set bitter rivalries aside to attack a common enemy. Their party may be shot through with profound ideological fissures, but nothing unites the faithful like a hatred of Hillary Clinton. "She is so out of step with the American people," said Mitt Romney. "She will wave the white flag," added John McCain, hinting that al-Qaeda is hoping for a Democratic president.

Beyond the need for more tax cuts, victory in Iraq and an impenetrable fence along the southern border, it is the only thing they can agree on. Whoever eventually wins the nomination, the Grand Old Party (GOP) is a cracked vehicle that must soon carry a candidate deeply unpalatable to the majority of its own supporters.

At conservative website townhall.com, columnists Eileen McGann and Dick Morris observed that as the primary season progresses, "economic conservatives are moving to Romney, social righties rallying round Mike Huckabee - and the national-security types who started for Rudy Giuliani have migrated to McCain The various factions are growing ever more alienated, demanding a level of purity from their candidates that makes consensus and unity less and less possible."

Former senator Rick Santorum, from the party's hardcore neo-conservative wing, put it even more bluntly: "It comes back to Romney can't win, Huckabee can't win, McCain can't win, Giuliani can't win. The dynamic is you have a bunch of candidates who can't win. I don't see how we don't come down to a convention that is going to decide this thing."

This week's Democratic debate in South Carolina was notable for its ill-tempered tone, but on questions of policy the contrast with the Republicans could not be more acute. Their campaign teams snipe and harass each other every bit as viciously as their GOP counterparts, but Clinton, Obama and Edwards are essentially running on nuanced versions of the same platform.

In George Bush, the Democrats have their own reassuring object of derision, but they are already anticipating a fight with McCain. Time and again at the debate they talked about how they would beat the Arizona senator in November, as if he had already been nominated. When Edwards said "I think it's becoming increasingly clear that John McCain will be the Republican candidate", Clinton and Obama nodded agreement.

McCain's campaign was resuscitated in New Hampshire and resurgent in South Carolina. His battle-hardened face stares purposefully from the cover of this week's Time magazine. But he knows better than to take his momentum for granted. In 2000, he left the northeast as the undisputed front-runner, only to be crushed by George Bush in the south, thanks in part to a smear campaign hinting that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock. The defeat was so painful that for years McCain swore he would never run for president again.

He has emerged as a leading contender in 2008 despite vicious, sustained criticism from hard-line conservatives. Talk-show host Rush Limbaugh warned his 13 million listeners that a McCain win would "destroy the Republican Party".

Fox News favourite Ann Coulter's criticism was more personal: "John McCain is Bob Dole minus the charm, conservatism and youth," she wrote on her syndicated blog.

"Unlike McCain, Dole didn't lie all the time while claiming to engage in Straight Talk. Of course, I might lie constantly too, if I were seeking the Republican presidential nomination after enthusiastically promoting amnesty for illegal aliens, social security credit for illegal aliens, criminal trials for terrorists, stem-cell research on human embryos, crackpot global warming legislation and free speech-crushing campaign-finance laws."

McCain's two primary wins so far both came courtesy of his strong appeal to independent voters. Among registered Republicans, he actually finished second behind Romney by narrow margins in both New Hampshire and South Carolina. On Super Tuesday, almost 60% of the states going to the polls are holding closed primaries, a crucial test of McCain's popularity within his own party.

Throughout the campaign, his unwavering focus has been national security, encapsulated in his speech to supporters from the deck of the USS Yorktown: "I am running for president of the United States of America because I believe the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism, which takes many forms.

"It's the greatest force of evil we've ever faced that is bent on our destruction and our extinction. And, my friends, we will never surrender. They will."

Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani are all hawks, too, but none of them can compete with his distinguished military service or his legislative record.

McCain is a conviction politician, brilliant on his specialist subjects of foreign policy and eliminating government corruption, but less sure-footed further down his manifesto. This week, the economy displaced Iraq and national security at the top of the agenda and it was Romney who benefited.

The marble-smooth multi-millionaire had already won in Michigan with a promise to use his business experience to revitalise the automobile industry. McCain, the straight talker, told communities battered by high unemployment that they should accept "those jobs aren't coming back". He was almost certainly right, but it cost him votes.

On Friday, in a direct appeal to the libertarian, low-tax, small-government wing of the party, Romney's campaign circulated emails implying that McCain opposes the financial stimulus package announced this week. By pulling quotes out of context, in the manner of all good attack ads, they showed McCain admitting "economics is not something I've understood as well as I should" and saying "spending is what's gotten us into the trouble we are in today".

Romney is trying to be all things to all Republicans: socially conservative, anti-tax, tough on immigration and an aggressive prosecutor of the war on terror who would double the size of Guantanamo. He has already won enough delegates to demonstrate that his not-McCain, not-Giuliani, not-Huckabee coalition is a viable prospect. But he is still widely disliked on the campaign trail, with a reputation for misrepresenting his rivals unfairly and a practiced charm that leaves political journalists cold.

Huckabee's campaign chairman Ed Rollins recently said: "What I have to do is make sure that my anger with a guy like Romney, whose teeth I want to knock out, doesn't get in the way of my thought process."

Because wooing evangelical voters was a key component of Romney's strategy from the outset, Huckabee's stunning win in Iowa was supposedly a critical blow to his chances. But he has scrambled impressively since then, and his huge personal wealth guarantees that he will last the distance. Unless Giuliani has somehow overturned a 10-point poll deficit in Florida, Romney is McCain's only credible challenger.

If neither can secure enough delegates to win the nomination outright, Huckabee could well become the Republican convention's kingmaker. His own slim hopes have been undermined by a lack of cash and a series of mis-steps betraying his political naivety, the most damaging being his assertion that "what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards".

The idea of altering the Constitution to ban abortion or gay marriage plays well to sections of the religious right, but most traditional conservatives saw his comments as an assault on libertarian values.

In the National Review, Republican strategist Lisa Schiffren described him as "the best advertisement ever for the ACLU American Civil Liberties Union".

Of all the candidates, the Arkansas pastor is by far the most persuasive orator. Who else remembered Elvis's birthday in their New Hampshire concession speech? But early assessments of his potential constituency too often made the assumption that evangelicals would continue to vote as they did in Iowa, as a monolithic group supporting the candidate who best reflects their moral outlook. In fact, in South Carolina evangelicals were split. Huckabee was the most popular candidate with people who attend church "more than weekly". But among regular Sunday worshippers, McCain won the most votes.

A week ago, sick of hearing Johnny B Goode at the end of every rally, McCain asked his campaign manager to change his tune. He now leaves the stage to Take A Chance On Me by ABBA, the song of a woman who knows she is her lover's second choice: "If you change your mind, I'm the first in line "

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay recently said that not even a Clinton candidacy could persuade him to vote McCain.

As the party's best hope, McCain is a chance that millions of Republicans may reluctantly have to take.