GOP front-runner John McCain is heading to Washington to try to convince a
conservative-rich
conference that he''''s their
man.man. Despite big wins in the Super Tuesday contests, McCain has yet to secure the support of his party''''s
conservative side. McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are all to speak during the three-day Conservative Political Action Committee
conference. "Our message will be that we all share common principles, common conservative principles, and we should coalesce around those issues," the Arizona senator said Wednesday.
"I do hope that at some point we would just calm down a little bit and see if there''''s areas that we can agree on for the good of the party and the good of the country," said McCain, who''''s been known to reach across the aisle at times. Comments like those caused some conservative talk-radio hosts to light into to McCain a day after Super Tuesday gave him a commanding lead and put him more than halfway to the number of delegates needed for the nomination. "When did the measure of conservatism, when did the measure of success, when did the measure of progress, when did it become reaching out to Democrats?" Rush Limbaugh said on his show Wednesday. "Why is it so hard to understand that what we want is to defeat those people? We view those people as threats to the American way of life, as we''''ve always known it. We view liberals as a threat to the founding of this country," he said. Laura Ingraham also expressed disdain over McCain''''s victories on her show. "McCain has so radicalized key conservatives that some have vowed to turn themselves into suicide voters next November by pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton," she said.
McCain is a conservative, just not always a politically correct conservative, said CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider. "He''''s a conservative, he''''s been a conservative for a long time, but on occasion he departs from the conservative orthodoxy," Schneider said. "He is now advertising his ability to make bipartisan deals on issues because that''''s what voters seem to want this year," he said. But McCain did win key GOP states like California and Missouri this week. In the all important Super Tuesday contests, McCain took at least 504 delegates, compared to 175 for Romney and 141 for Huckabee. Less than half -- 49 percent -- of Tuesday''''s voters who said they voted for McCain described themselves as "conservative," exit polls from the 15 states holding GOP contests showed.