John McCain's Ohio disconnect

What surprised Burress was how badly the meeting went. He says he tried but failed to make the McCain team understand how much work remained to overcome the skepticism of social conservatives. Burress ended up cutting off the campaign officials as they spoke. "He doesn't want to associate with us," Burress now says of McCain, "and we don't want to associate with him."

That meeting and other run-ins with conservatives, some Republicans say, have revealed the depth of the challenge facing McCain: mollifying Republican constituencies that have distrusted many of his policy positions, in order to build the machinery needed to push voters to the polls in November.

If McCain tried to gather his volunteers in Ohio, "you could meet in a phone booth," said radio host Bill Cunningham, who attacks the Arizona senator regularly on his talk show. "There's no sense in this part of Ohio that John McCain is a conservative or that his election would have a material benefit to conservatism."

Were McCain running on Bush's 2004 strategy, fractures like these might be devastating. Bush and his chief political hand, Karl Rove, built their winning plan on exciting conservatives with hard-line, often religious-themed rhetoric and policy proposals, such as backing the same-sex-marriage ban and giving churches federal funds to perform social services.

But as the 2008 general-election campaign begins, it is clear this year will be different. Both McCain and presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama hope to energize core party activists, but each also hopes to win votes in the political center -- from the independents, moderate women, blue-collar whites and Latinos who tend to swing from one party to the other, and who are turned off by highly partisan rhetoric.

For McCain, who has spent four months since securing the GOP nomination stockpiling money and planning the fall campaign, these tasks may prove difficult to balance. As his run-ins with some conservatives here show, burnishing his image as an independent-minded Republican has sometimes left bruised feelings among reliable friends in the GOP base, who in the past have helped the party as voters and volunteers.