RLINGTON, Va. - Hands went up throughout the ballroom yesterday when conservative activists, attending their annual convention, were asked if they could support the Republican Party's nominee for president. Getting specific, what if the nominee were George W. Bush? Quite a few hands went down.
On the surface, conservatives have won the battle for the soul of the Republican Party. Each of the GOP's six presidential candidates says he is a true conservative and to prove it, touts an agenda of cutting taxes, strengthening US defenses, and fighting abortion rights.
But as they gather for the 27th Conservative Political Action Conference on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, these grass-roots activists are surprisingly uneasy, worried as much about what they fear is the centerward drift of GOP candidates Bush, the Texas governor, and John McCain, the Arizona senator, as they are about the Democrats holding onto the White House in November.
''George Bush is playing the centrist card and floating in the wind too much for me,'' said Jim Renne of Alexandria. ''McCain believes strongly in the conventional wisdom that you have to be a center-right politician to win, and he'll sell out at the drop of a hat.''
In a noontime address to the group, GOP candidate Alan Keyes said the Republican Party was ''careening toward disaster'' and ''copping out'' on its conservative core of supporters and principles if it nominated front-runner Bush. ''He's a likable fellow, but he cannot get the job done,'' said Keyes, who got a standing ovation after presenting his solutions for what he says is America's moral crisis.
Later, in a speech via satellite from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Steve Forbes described rivals Bush and McCain as ''the timid twins'' for proposing ''weak'' tax plans and being ''pacifists'' on abortion. ''They say they are pro-life, but they won't fight for what they say they believe,'' said Forbes, who is running a distant second to Bush in Iowa, polls show.
McCain turned down an invitation to speak. Feeling pressure from McCain in New Hampshire, where the primary will be held Feb. 1, Bush this week agreed to address the conference tomorrow, a move viewed by some as a way to hastily curry conservative support.
It may not win over Sylvia Hausenblas, a conventioneer from Bryant Pond, Maine, who says the GOP is so preoccupied with winning in November that it has marginalized true conservative candidates like Keyes and Forbes. ''Four years ago, the political and financial establishment selected Bob Dole as our nominee,'' she said. ''This time, they are crowning Bush the prince.''
David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said if Bush wins the nomination, support from conservatives will depend on how faithful he is to their agenda in a general-election campaign.
''I will say this: Conservatives came into this hoping they would like Bush but suspecting they might not be able to,'' Keene said. ''So far, he has not given them any specific reason not to like him. The policies he has articulated have been generally consistent with the conservative agenda.''
That is not the case with McCain, who, despite a solid conservative voting record in the Senate, raises suspicions here that he is too cozy with the news media and too much of a maverick to be trusted. McCain's commitment to overhauling the campaign finance laws, and, specifically to barring interest groups from unlimited spending on issue advertising, is vehemently opposed by many conservatives who believe his proposals infringe on the First Amendment right to free political speech.
''It's not his temper - that would be unfair - but John McCain is one of those politicians who sees himself as always right and those who oppose him as not just wrong, but evil,'' Keene said. ''That makes a lot of conservatives in Washington nervous.''
Equally unnerving for them is that a prosperous and peaceful America seems to be moving a little to the left this election year. It's clearly the case with the contest between Democratic candidates Bill Bradley and Vice President Al Gore, who are each proposing a more activist government. And Bush fashions himself a compassionate conservative who doesn't agree with the harshest rhetoric of the GOP Congress.
If Bush and McCain are trying to blur their conservative images, it's working. In a poll released this week by the Pew Research Center, GOP voters were divided about Bush: 40 percent said they think he is a moderate and 40 percent believe he is a conservative. About 60 percent of GOP voters think McCain is a moderate, the survey showed.
Political analyst William Schneider says Republicans have taken a page from the Democrats' 1992 playbook, that it's better to be a centrist winner than a defeated true believer.
''In the sense that all the GOP candidates are characterizing themselves as conservatives and seeking conservative support, we have a lot of horses to ride,'' Keene said. ''The problem is that when you get back to the corral, you have to separate the thoroughbreds from the swaybacks.''
