By David Nather, CQ Staff

Want to know what faint praise sounds like? Walk up to a Republican in the halls of the Capitol and utter the words “President McCain.”

Can his fellow Republicans remaining behind in Congress work with John McCain if he gets to move into the Oval Office next year? “I think we could,” Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina said, choosing his words carefully after a pregnant pause. “People have pretty short memories up here.”

THE LONG VIEW: McCain last week addressing the Conservative Political Action Committee, where he was booed two hours after he effectively secured the GOP nomination because of Romney’s withdrawal. (CQ / SCOTT J. FERRELL)

DeMint was a supporter of the more vocally conservative Mitt Romney at the time, so perhaps his lukewarm view of McCain shouldn’t be a surprise. But listen to Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who chairs the Senate Republican Policy Committee and hasn’t endorsed a candidate. Her best offering is: “All of us realize that we’re not going to be 100 percent where the president is” and that “we’ll be able to work through it.”

Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who is also officially neutral, predicts that McCain would at least act less rebellious in dealing with members of his own party. “When you’re president, it’s a different thing,” said Roberts. “You’re not Crusader Rabbit. You’re the president.”

And John Cornyn , the other Texas senator, laughed and offered only this: “It’ll be interesting, won’t it?” He knows that much from experience. During last year’s debate over an immigration policy overhaul, which McCain was pushing and Cornyn opposed, the two got into a heated argument in which McCain shouted obscenities at him. The incident encapsulates the well-known darker aspects of McCain’s style that — as much as his maverick streak on policy — have distanced him from so many in the normally collegial Senate. Many of his colleagues find him self-righteous, dogmatic, unpredictable and hot-tempered — especially when he’s crossed, and even with the Republicans who are usually his allies.

All of the above interviews were conducted before Romney suspended his campaign last week after a poor Super Tuesday showing. Within hours of the former Massachusetts governor’s decision, the race for the 2008 Republican nomination had changed completely. DeMint urged conservatives to rally around McCain as their best hope of holding the White House for the GOP. And even Cornyn endorsed McCain, telling reporters that whatever their differences, McCain still stood “head and shoulders” above the Democrats on national security and fiscal issues.

Cornyn and the rest are all part of an effort by Republican senators to bend over backwards to find positive things to say about a McCain presidency — now that they see it as a real possibility. The same thing is happening among some of the conservative interest groups that have so often vilified him, more because of their differences with his iconoclastic ideology than because they can’t deal with his combative attitude. National Right to Life, which produced attack ads against McCain the last time he ran for president, in 2000, put out a statement two weeks ago saying it is “grateful for the strong pro-life voting record on abortion of Sen. John McCain .” Even Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist and longtime McCain adversary, now says the Arizona senator has “put together a very aggressive, very good, pro-growth economic plan.”

What neither the advocates on the right nor members of Congress do — with the exception of the four dozen lawmakers who have actually endorsed McCain — is gush about him. And that lack of enthusiasm matters. In the face of so much skepticism from his Republican colleagues and conservative activists, on top of the obstacles any president faces in steering meaningful legislation through a polarized Congress, a President McCain would have a uniquely difficult challenge governing the nation, if he got the chance.

Campaigning vs. Governing

Right now, McCain is riding high on the momentum from his Super Tuesday triumph of last week, when he won a string of coast-to-coast primaries and emerged with more than half the delegates he needs to secure the nomination at the party convention in September in St. Paul, Minn. But his victories — and the fact that by week’s end he was essentially the nominee-in-waiting — hardly ended doubts about him on the political right.

Just before McCain spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, two hours after Romney announced his withdrawal to the same gathering, an audience member who said he was no McCain fan urged the crowd to agree “that we should not boo the man.” It didn’t work. McCain was greeted with more than a scattering of loud boos and jeers, even as he assured the audience that he shared their core values and would always listen to their concerns. And in the hotel lobby just afterward, several activists held up signs saying, “Stop McCain’s Amnesty.”

Even if he can persuade his critics to hold their tongues for the rest of the year, securing the nomination and then winning the general election takes one set of political allies and skills; governing takes a largely different set. Not all of McCain’s conservative critics are making nice with him. In fact, many insist they’ll never work with him, because they believe he has launched too many battles against his own side and has enjoyed it just a bit too much. “McCain as a president would probably be great for business — for me,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank that fought against McCain’s bill to provide illegal immigrants a way to earn citizenship. “But there wouldn’t be any working with him.”

And while the political environment could change over the next nine months, the current dynamics strongly favor the Democrats not only keeping control of Congress but also expanding their majorities in the House and Senate. That means that the same McCain who is promising to continue the war in Iraq — and calling the Democrats’ withdrawal proposals the “white flag of surrender” in the process — would have to figure out how to win over enough of that party’s votes to break filibusters on any of his legislative proposals or nominations that have even the slightest hint of controversy.

“I don’t think anything is easy around here,” Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California said about life in the Senate. “You have to have 60 votes to do anything around here. And he would have to get 60 votes.”

At some point, a McCain administration would have no choice but to figure out how to reconcile those competing pressures. Should he govern from the right, as a more consistent conservative than he ever has been during his 21 years as a senator, hoping to build strength within his party and peel away just enough Democrats to muscle his agenda through? Or should he use a more bipartisan model — the approach he has used in the Senate on issues such as immigration, campaign finance, health care and the environment — and hope he doesn’t lose the trust he has worked so hard to build with conservatives on his road toward the nomination?

Conservative activists, naturally, hope McCain will choose the first approach. “If he governs in a conservative fashion, making the tax cuts permanent, eliminating earmarks, then conservatives will be delighted to work with him,” said conservative strategist Craig Shirley.

As a bit of a warning, though, Shirley cites the often-quoted political line that “only Nixon could go to China” — meaning that it takes a president with years of grounding in a political cause, such as anti-communism for Richard Nixon, to persuade his side to go along with a major change. McCain, in this view, doesn’t have that kind of maneuvering room. “He’s successfully making the case” that he can be considered a conservative, said Shirley, but “he doesn’t have that 30 years invested in the conservative movement the way Ronald Reagan did.”

A Bipartisan Background

But it’s not clear that McCain would see an ideologically driven strategy as the wisest path to accomplishing his goals, no matter how much ground he’s trying to make up with his Republican colleagues and conservative activists.

He has a lengthy history of partnerships with Democrats. And unlike either of his potential Democratic opponents in the general election — Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, both of whom have also worked across the aisle in the Senate — many of McCain’s bipartisan partnerships have centered on risky issues, not just safe subjects. He worked with Russ Feingold of Wisconsin on the 2002 campaign finance law, with Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts on last year’s immigration bill, with Kennedy and John Edwards of North Carolina on the “patient’s bill of rights” in 2001, and with Ben Nelson of Nebraska as co-leaders of the “Gang of 14,” the bipartisan group of senators that blocked a showdown three years ago over filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominees.

In addition, his support so far in this year’s caucuses and primaries has come from a diverse coalition of supporters — some conservatives, moderates and Hispanics — and his strength against potential Democratic rivals has always rested in part on his appeal to independents.

“ John McCain has broken from the base strategy that Karl Rove articulated,” said Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “I would expect a John McCain presidency to be much more pragmatic.” The model, he said, would probably be more like Ronald Reagan than George W. Bush : setting broad goals, with a strong dose of conservatism, but compromising with Democrats when necessary to accomplish those goals.

Counting on a Mandate

McCain’s advisers don’t think the governing model will be that hard to figure out. If he wins the election, they say, that in itself will demonstrate that his policies appeal to a broad enough coalition of voters to deserve support on Capitol Hill — whether he governs from the right or as a more bipartisan figure.

Congress Rarely Tops a President's Resume: Click here to view chart

“If he wins the nomination, he’ll campaign on his record and his policies. When they’re embraced by the voters, you carry the support of those voters, and that generates support everywhere else,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who now advises McCain on economic policy. “It’s one thing to have a tough, close battle on the Senate floor. It’s another thing when you’re the leader of the free world. So I think there would be a different set of dynamics.”

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of McCain’s closest allies, argues that McCain would benefit from the years he has spent working with his Senate colleagues. In his view, having any prior history with the chamber at all creates a bond with senators that will make it easier to work together.

“From a Senate Republican point of view, it will be good to have someone you’ve done business with, someone you’ve had run-ins with,” said Graham. “I’ve told my colleagues this. I’ve had plenty of arguments with them too, but 80 percent of the time, we agree.”

And, of course, it’s far too early to know whether a McCain administration is likely at all. That depends on who his Democratic opponent is and how motivated his voters can get. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll last week found McCain running slightly behind both Clinton and Obama, though earlier polls have suggested a closer race in both cases.

Some of the clues about how McCain would govern will come from what he says if and when he is able to turn his attention to the fall campaign. In the heat of the nomination race, McCain has fudged his positions on key issues such as immigration, on which he has refused to say whether he would vote for his own bill again or to say much else about his current thinking, other than that he would stress border security first. In the general election, he would be pressed to be more specific.

And to win support from the right, McCain promised the CPAC audience that he would pursue “a clearly conservative approach to governing” — a line that drew loud applause. He promised to reduce the size of government, cut taxes, pursue “free-market solutions” to expand health care coverage, resist timetables to withdraw troops from Iraq, prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and fight “the terrible evil of radical Islamic extremism.”

“I believe today, as I believed 25 years ago, in small government; fiscal discipline; low taxes; a strong defense; judges who enforce, and not make, our laws; the social values that are the true source of our strength; and, generally, the steadfast defense of our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which I have defended my entire career as God-given to the born and unborn,” said McCain.

Anyone who is expecting more outreach to conservatives than that, however, may be disappointed. “I think Sen. McCain is going to make an effort to reach out to people, but he’s not going to change who he is,” said former Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, a vice-chairman of the global investment bank UBS and one of McCain’s top economic advisers.

Setting Priorities

The conventional wisdom on McCain all along has been that he would tack to the right just long enough to win the nomination, then move to the center for the general election. In fact, though, McCain has such a mixed record in the Senate that his positioning is often just a matter of emphasis — whether he chooses to shine the spotlight on the roughly 80 percent of issues on which he sides with conservatives, according to conservative interest groups’ “score cards,” or whether he plays up the other 20 percent that usually get all the attention.

Not a Typical Senate GOP Scorecard: Click here to view chart

Even more important, though, will be what he chooses as his priorities if he wins the presidency. A decision to push an immigration overhaul in the first year, for example, would set up very different dynamics than waiting until later in his presidency, said Bruce Oppenheimer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University.

In addition, Oppenheimer said, a general election campaign would compel McCain to flesh out his domestic agenda. He has been able to build much of his primary campaign on his promise to wage an effective war against Islamic terrorism, but the Democratic nominee would challenge him to get more specific about topics he has largely been able to avoid so far, including his votes in the past year against legislation to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

As the GOP nominee, McCain would also be pressed to speak more about his health care proposal, a collection of traditional Republican ideas such as tax credits and small-business purchasing pools. And he’d have to hope that the rest of the voters supported, or at least respected, his defense of the Iraq War as much as Republican voters do.

But if it all works out for him, and McCain ends up winning on Nov. 4, he will still face the challenge of how to motivate the people on his own side. If his advisers are correct, he’d be able to wave his election victory in the faces of his critics. In practice, though, good will usually matters too. When Democrats talk about the prospect of a new President Clinton or a President Obama, they get genuinely excited, if for no other reason than the history-making potential of the first woman or the first African-American in the White House. McCain just doesn’t generate that kind of excitement among his Senate colleagues or conservative activists.

And maybe that’s not important to him; his target audience, after all, is a broad coalition of voters, not the insiders. But if he gets a chance to govern, he’ll have to at least be able to work with the insiders. Right now, many of them don’t sound ready to put aside their reservations. “You have to say, ‘Why is this guy an R?’ ” said Republican Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, a Romney supporter, in a statement that forcefully sums up the public and private doubts of McCain’s conservative critics.

A History of Exceptions

McCain has tried throughout the campaign to convince Republican voters that he’s on their side. And his record shows that he’s no moderate — particularly after his spirited defense of the war and his fights against A-Democratic proposals for troop withdrawal.

But his list of exceptions is long enough that it makes many Republicans wonder, as Kingston does, what else keeps McCain in the party. He voted against the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, though he now says he would make them permanent. He voted for expanding stem cell research and against a constitutional ban on gay marriage. He pushed to mandate criminal background checks for customers at gun shows. He opposed drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He worked with Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts to require cars and light trucks to get better gas mileage — and the two have been close enough that Kerry tried to persuade McCain to be his running mate in the 2004 presidential campaign.

And that’s before you even get to his work in behalf of stricter campaign finance regulations, “cap and trade” policies to reduce global warming, the Gang of 14, which prevented Senate Republicans from barring Democrats from mounting judicial filibusters, and an immigration bill that provoked a loud public backlash. (Maverick stands, p. 360)

“He has made a career out of fighting against everything we’re for,” said David N. Bossie, president of Citizens United, a conservative group that ran television ads about McCain’s “surprisingly liberal” record before the Super Tuesday primaries. “And he revels in that job. He doesn’t just do it.”

Some conservative leaders hold out hope that, as president, McCain would put his combative streak to use to advance the high-hurdle causes of fiscal conservative issues — such as overhauling Social Security to make it more solvent in the long term — and take on the Democrats with the same fervor that he has used against his GOP colleagues. “The good news is that he’s someone who is not afraid to make people mad,” said former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, who’s now chairman of FreedomWorks, a group that advocates smaller government. “The controversy is that he’s done that to people within his own party. But he is a guy who I believe will see the big picture on issues like Social Security and will be willing to take on Ted Kennedy and the liberal left.”

And some Republican senators say his frequent fights against his party will become a thing of the past if he is elected president. “He’ll be in a very different role,” said Saxby Chambliss of Georgia. “He’s going to be in a position of promoting good legislation, as opposed to being in a position of stopping legislation.”

But the sparring has already created the impression, especially among House Republicans, that there are even more differences than actually exist. “He’s pro-choice, isn’t he?” Kingston asked. Actually, he isn’t. McCain has a solid record of support for restrictions on abortions, and with the exception of his votes for stem cell research, anti-abortion groups now give him credit for siding with their views.

“You’ve got to remember that throughout the years, we’ve agreed with him on more issues than we disagreed,” said David O’Steen, executive director of National Right to Life. But it was the group’s other major disagreement with McCain — over his long effort to enact the campaign finance law — that helped launch the attack ads against him by National Right to Life and other interest groups in the South Carolina GOP primary campaign of 2000.

Indeed, the campaign finance bill alone created an entire league of opponents, uniting tax cut advocates, social conservatives, and the National Rifle Association against him. It also pitted him against a man he would have to work closely with as president: Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, now the Senate Republican leader. McConnell fought the McCain-Feingold campaign finance proposals for years, and sued to overturn the law after it was enacted.

Now, McConnell insists those days are in the past — and last week he, too, threw his support to McCain. “I’ve had some disagreements with John McCain over the years, but he’s my friend,” he told CPAC. “More importantly for this race, he’s a conservative. And he has my full support.” And McCain has spoken well of McConnell, writing in his 2002 memoir, “Worth the Fighting For,” that “I have come to respect Mitch” and that McConnell has “the courage of his convictions.”

But their battles took some nasty turns at the time. In a 2002 deposition in the campaign finance lawsuit, McCain claimed that McConnell had told Republican senators in 1998 that if they voted against an anti-smoking bill, the tobacco industry would pay for television ads in their defense — an allegation that, if true, would have suggested that the Kentucky senator was offering something close to a bribe.

McConnell, in his own deposition, responded that McCain has a “rather active imagination” and noted that unlike McCain, “I’ve never been the subject of an Ethics Committee investigation.” He was referring to McCain’s role in the “Keating Five,” the group of senators investigated for allegedly interceding with federal regulators to help savings and loan operator Charles H. Keating Jr. In 1991 McCain received a mild rebuke from the Senate, an event that ultimately led to his rebirth as an advocate of ethics and campaign finance overhauls. (Keating Five, p. 356)

McCain has also taken on lawmakers from his own party in behalf of a more conservative cause: reducing domestic spending and getting rid of earmarks. One of his favorite talking points on the campaign trail has been the “bridges to nowhere,” two proposed connectors to barely populated areas of Alaska that came to symbolize out-of-control spending in the 2006 election.

“Now, which would you rather do? Have the bridge to nowhere in Alaska, a $233 million bridge to an island with 50 people on it, or a $1,000 tax credit for every child in America?” McCain asked at a campaign rally in South Carolina last month. As president, he said, he would “veto every single pork-barrel, earmark-project-laden bill that comes across my desk.”

That promise should win him support from fiscal conservatives, but it won’t make him many friends among the appropriators — especially Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, who led the fight to build the bridges. Stevens says he could work with a President McCain, but it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. “I’ve worked with presidents of all parties and all stripes, and I can work with anybody,” he said. After all, he said, the roles of the president and the Senate “are set out in the Constitution.”

Jerry Lewis of California, the top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, made no such predictions. “I will be honest enough to say that McCain is not my candidate,” he said.

The Diplomacy Gap

To work effectively with Republicans in Congress, McCain will have to overcome two obstacles from his lengthy service in the Senate. The first is the numerous disagreements on issues that were important to his party. The second is purely personal: his temper.

The Path to the Nomination: Click here to view chart

Long before McCain’s shouting match with Cornyn, he had gained a reputation for his volatile fits of pique. He has vented at Republican and Democratic colleagues, often with bursts of profanity. He has chewed out journalists he believes to be asking uninformed questions. And he has sent letters that he probably should have waited a day and read again, such as a missive to Obama — sent in February 2006, almost a year before the Illinois senator began running for president — after he concluded that Obama had backed out of a pledge to work with him on a bipartisan lobbying overhaul bill.

“I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere,” said the letter, which is still archived on McCain’s Senate Web site. “I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won’t make the same mistake again.”

Such incidents have revived the questions McCain faced during his first presidential run in 2000, when his Senate colleagues worried about what he might do if he lost his temper as president. No one looks forward to the first legislative negotiation that fails because President McCain curses out the congressional leadership.

Worse yet, though, some of his political opponents actually relish the thought of provoking him into an outburst under the harsh spotlight of the White House press corps. “That’s really his Achilles’ heel,” said Krikorian, the anti-immigration activist. “I’m going to think up ways to provoke him into rash and inappropriate statements, because it’s all there under the surface — and not even that far under the surface.”

For what it’s worth, though, Chambliss — in an observation that was probably intended as a compliment — insists that “John has made great strides with his temper.”

“He and I have talked about it, and I think he has matured a lot, and he made the decision that he wanted to do better,” said Chambliss. “He’ll be fine.”

Common Ground

Despite the differences, there are issues on which Republican lawmakers and A-conservative leaders think they’d be able to work easily with a McCain administration.

The war is an obvious example, since McCain has been outspoken in his insistence that “we’re succeeding in Iraq” and determined to resist timetables to withdraw troops. That’s a popular position among Republicans, though not among the broader public. And it’s also one he could sustain easily even with a Democratic Congress, since Bush has shown how little leverage Congress has to end a war over a president’s objections.

“The surge policy is his. It worked,” said Gramm. “That’s an incredible feat of leadership for a senator to stand up to his own party and his own president and say, ‘This strategy is not working,’ and persuade them to change it. If that’s not working with people, I don’t know what is.”

The first issue most Republican senators mention as an area of common ground, however, is fiscal restraint. McCain promises to continue his fight against “pet projects” in the White House, and he says he’ll “use the bully pulpit to make the people who are wasting your money famous.” Such sentiments appeal to DeMint, who opposed McCain’s immigration plan but shares his zeal for cracking down on earmarks. “On economic and spending issues, we could come together,” said DeMint. “He might annoy some appropriators. But we’d work it out.”

Armey, meanwhile, sees McCain as a president who might revive Bush’s effort to overhaul Social Security as a step toward bringing entitlement spending under control. McCain has supported private savings accounts in the past but is vague about his solutions today. He says only that he’ll submit Social Security and Medicare overhaul plans to Congress. “If Congress is afraid to make those choices, then they can just let me do it. I’ll take the heat,” he told the Economic Club of Memphis last April.

McCain is gradually gaining acceptance for his views on tax cuts. Norquist notes that although the senator didn’t sign a pledge not to raise taxes, he has made that promise in other settings. “He has said it a bunch of times, and my goal is for him to keep saying it a bunch of times,” Norquist said.

And as much as conservatives resented McCain’s votes against Bush’s tax cuts, they are somewhat reassured by his promises to try to extend them indefinitely. “Even though many of us felt that he was not in the right place on tax cuts, I think he has come to the right place,” said Hutchison.

Even on immigration, the biggest recent issue on which the candidate has been out of step with most Republican voters’ views, Cornyn says McCain has made the right noises since the collapse of his bill last year. While he mainly just talks about border security now, “I’ve also heard him say, ‘I get it. I heard you,’ ” said Cornyn. “So those kinds of statements are welcomed.”

That just leaves the laundry list of other issues where McCain hasn’t seen eye to eye with his party. If he wins the presidency, Republicans may have little choice but to swallow those differences. But it’s not the end of the world, says Armey. “My experience with John McCain ,” he said, “is that he’s willing to listen to you if you’re serious and you’ve done your homework and you treat him with respect.”

FOR FURTHER READING:

McCain profiles, 2006 CQ Weekly, p. 1220; 2002 CQ Weekly, p. 2290; 2000 CQ Weekly, p. 314; Obama and Clinton, CQ Weekly, p. 124; immigration, p. 50; congressional election outlook, 2007 CQ Weekly, p. 3536; Super Tuesday, p. 1670; campaign finance law (PL 107-155), 2002 Almanac, p. 14-7; Keating investigation, 1991 Almanac, p. 27; 1991 CQ Weekly, p. 221.