John McCain continues to spend time distancing himself from his own supporters.

Earlier this week it was a talk show host in Cincinnati. Today it's Pastor John Hagee, an influential religious leader who has made comments many consider anti-Catholic or outrageous for other reasons.

Here's McCain's statement from today:

“Yesterday, Pastor John Hagee endorsed my candidacy for president in San Antonio, Texas. However, in no way did I intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee's views, which I obviously do not.

“I am hopeful that Catholics, Protestants and all people of faith who share my vision for the future of America will respond to our message of defending innocent life, traditional marriage, and compassion for the most vulnerable in our society."

Democrats immediately shot back, saying that explanation "is not good enough."

"Which views does he agree with?" they wondered.

The Democrats' charges aside, the fact that McCain has to spend time dealing with this underscores the difficult balancing act he has as he tries to form a coalition out of the disparate parts of the Republican movement.

Part of the problem could be that McCain, while holding a solid conservative voting record, has staked out a leadership role in areas far removed from the social issues religious conservatives care about. Now he's trying to get up to speed, and it's not proving easy.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Just when he'd appeared to have recovered among conservative talk radio hosts by finding a common enemy in the New York Times, John McCain may have shed all of that good will by feuding with one of them earlier this week.

McCain blasted a radio talk show host in Ohio who had warmed up a crowd for him earlier this week by repeatedly saying Barack Obama's middle name, Hussein. McCain said he wasn't going to allow personal attacks to be part of his campaign.

The talk-show host, Bill Cunningham, was not pleased, and neither were top hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, who sided with Cunningham and blasted McCain.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reported earlier this week that feud could cost McCain votes in Ohio, maybe the most important state in the general election.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Mike Huckabee wants one more debate before Tuesday's primaries, and it's one of those instances where there's little risk for anyone involved — except, possibly, viewers.

Huckabee has asked John McCain for a one-on-one Lincoln-Douglas style debate, but has also accepted an invitation to a Values Voter debate in Texas on Monday, saying he'll show up if McCain does, too.

McCain has yet to respond.

But there's plenty of reasons why he should say yes. With the debate coming Monday, it's unlikely Huckabee could sway enough voters to erase McCain's apparent leads in Texas, Ohio and the other states that hold primaries the following day.

And as the McCain camp has noted, Huckabee's presence earns McCain front-page coverage in newspapers and keeps him on the television newscasts even as Democrats dominate. In other words, without Huckabee, McCain would be pushed off the front pages in favor of coverage of the hot Democrat primary fight.

There is some risk. Huckabee could try to out-conservative McCain, which would keep alive the story line that McCain has a problem with his party's base. And Ron Paul, the other candidate in the race, could land a zinger. But the former is unlikely given how Huckabee has handled himself so far, and in the case of Paul there's little ground that hasn't been covered between him and McCain.

So the more likely danger is to viewers, who might tune in expecting a dust-up and instead get one of those affairs where the candidates compete to be nice to each other — which usually means we don't learn much about anyone.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Last week I wrote about John McCain gaining support among pro-life leaders for his consistent voting record on restricting abortion — everything from from federal funding to limits on the procedure itself. On the whole they were enthusiastic in their support, particularly when they drew the comparison between McCain and either of his potential Democratic opponents.

But one issue still troubled some of the pro-lifers — when choosing judges, does McCain owe more fealty to his pro-life roots or to his own personal crusades such as campaign finance reform.

Along those lines, here's an item from last month by Brad Smith, a law professor and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, who said in his experience it's tough to find conservative potential judicial nominees who agree with McCain on both:

"It is very hard, however, to find judicial candidates who think McCain-Feingold is constitutional yet who are also are anti-Roe v. Wade and generally respectful of the Constitution. For anyone with a coherent judicial philosophy of federalism and limited government, the two just don't go together."

And this gets at the deeper discontent many conservatives have for McCain. He's amassed a solid voting record on their issues, garnering a lifetime 82.3 percent rating from the American Conservative Union, but the issues on which he's chosen to make the extra effort usually put him at odds with conservatives.

So when it comes to a McCain administration, does he follow his base or does he follow his heart? Look for pro-lifers to try to make McCain address that point head-on.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Today he's blasting the New York Times, but six years ago John McCain singled the paper out as being a particularly credible source, with its articles worthy of inclusion in the permanent journal of Senate proceedings.

The statement came during a deposition in 2002, when his campaign finance law was being challenged. One of the lawyers asked him what sort of standards he used when deciding what articles he would insert in the Congressional Record, which is the official journal of House and Senate floor proceedings.

"I think it's important to insert credible media outlets such as The New York Times," McCain said, adding that would also apply to publications such as the Los Angeles Times "because most people give them credibility."

Maybe it's just more evidence for Rush Limbaugh's "See, I told you so" statement on his radio program this week, after the story broke.

As Limbaugh put it on his radio program Thursday:

"There's a great opportunity here for Senator McCain to learn the right lesson and understand who his friends are and who his enemies are. He's had that backwards for way too long. He has thought the New York Times is his friend. He has thought Chris Matthews and these other people in the Drive-By Media are his friends. They aren't. That's the lesson today."

The deposition included some other interesting tidbits, not least of which was an apparent contradiction between what McCain said in 2002 about his interaction with lobbyists or agents for Paxson Communications and what the McCain campaign said Wendesday night in refuting the New York Times story

The New York Times and Washington Post reports questioned whether McCain acted improperly in sending two letters in 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging action on the sale of a Pittsburgh television station to Paxson Communications. The female lobbyist in question in both reports was working on behalf of Paxson.

In a long memo sent to reporters Wednesday night the McCain campaign denied the senator ever talked to key figures in the deal about writing letters: "No representative of Paxson or [the lobbying firm] Alcalde and Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC regarding this proceeding."

But in the 2002 deposition McCain said owner Bud Paxson contacted him personally to ask him to take action.

"I said I would be glad to write a letter asking them to act. But I will not write a letter, I cannot write a letter asking them to approve or deny, because then that would be an interference in their activities," he said, according to his deposition.

McCain said if he had asked for a specific ruling from the FCC, "then I would have been open to at least allegations that I acted in behalf of a contributor."

He went on to say "Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint" about delays at the FCC, and said his job as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee at the time "is to see that bureaucracies do function."

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Two months after it was first rumored and caused a huge splash on the Drudge Report, the New York Times has released its story on Sen. John McCain and his relationship with a female lobbyist three decades his junior.

In its story, running in Thursday's papers and posted Wednesday night on the Web, the Times does not assert there was a romantic relationship. However, it cites McCain's personal ties to the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, to indicate that the Arizona senator — who has become synonymous with challenging Washington to clean itself up — has himself stepped over the line.

The story rehashes McCain's past problems with ethics rules, but there's no hard-and-fast evidence of new violations — only a lot of suggestion that there's something fishy going on.

Remember, of course, that this comes less than a month after that very same paper endorsed McCain as the best Republican in the race — a choice it called "an easy one."

There will be plenty of questions about the Times, which by its own accounting in the story was hard at work in December, when McCain had yet to grab a stranglehold on the Republican presidential nomination. Some Republicans opposing McCain are bound to question that decision as an effort to choose, then weaken, their candidate.

For its part, the McCain camp is not amused. Spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker released this statement soon after the article was posted on the Times Web site tonight:

"It is a shame that the New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit and run smear campaign. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.

"Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career."

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Update/6:54 p.m.: The McCain camp says they're still in good shape, the challenge is premature and by the time all the counties report their signatures they'll have met the bar.

"It's just a lag time," said spokesman Brian Rogers.

He said they report their signatures to the counties, which tally them and send them on to the state. That process won't be completed until Friday.

"Basically they're looking at an incomplete count of signatures, and we're well over the 500 required in that congressional district," Rogers said.

An undergraduate student at Indiana University says Sen. John McCain should be left off Indiana's May 6 primary ballot, arguing the Republican presidential frontrunner failed to get the needed signatures.

Thomas Cook, who runs the blog Blue Indiana, filed an official challenge today with the state election commission. Cook said he was monitoring the signatures for a gubernatorial race but also happened to notice McCain fell short in one congressional district of the 500 signatures required by state law from each district in order to get on the ballot.

Cook's challenge says McCain fell nine votes short in the fourth congressional district, arguably the most Republican in the state.

"It's indicative, I think, of a complete failure on the part of John McCain's national infrastructure, and the incompetence of his national campaign," Cook said in a phone interview.

He said that given Republicans who back McCain control the top offices in state government, he doesn't doubt that they will find a way to keep McCain on the ballot, but said it's a black mark against the eventual Republican nominee anyway.

Indiana has 57 delegates to the Republican nominative convention, of which 27 are up for selection in the winner-take-all primary in May. Clearly if McCain were left off the ballot it would not be a major hurdle to his securing the nomination, but it could be a black eye. Still, the bigger black eye might come if he gets on the ballot anyway, and Democrats make an issue of it.

McCain's campaign didn't immediately return a call about the ballot situation.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

The final network exit polls from last night's Wisconsin primary show Sen. John McCain did top Mike Huckabee among self-identified conservative voters, winning just short of half of all Republican primary voters there.

It's McCain's fourth victory among conservatives (out of 24 races where exit-polling has been conducted), but his second victory in the last three contests, suggesting he may finally be gaining some momentum among conservatives.

Here are the numbers from those three most recent contests:

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Could McCain's nomination mean an immigration deal this year?

Greg Siskind has come up with a scenario that argues Democrats should be tempted, now that John McCain is the likely Republican nominee, is to rush an immigration bill through this year.

"Do you think the GOP is going to allow their rank-and-file members to attack their nominee day in day out over the immigration issue? If they do, the results could be disastrous as McCain will be going around the country trying to unite a very fractured party that is already pretty suspicious of his conservative bona fides. Can you imagine one Republican after another having to come to the microphone to denounce the McCain-Kennedy bill (and that's what Reid and Pelosi need to call it every chance they get)? And then McCain being dogged by reporters asking about it multiple times each day?"

In his scenario, immigration could also be the tail that wags the dog — a way for Democrats to distract from their own intraparty presidential battle, particularly if the Clinton-Obama race goes all the way to a convention.

"[T]hrowing the immigration 'grenade' and stirring up the immigration storm in the GOP may make the Democrats bickering look pretty tame," he writes, adding that that would put pressure on Republican leaders to cut a deal on Democrats' terms to keep their own fight under wraps. Siskind says bringing back the bill this year "would have virtually no drawbacks" for Democrats.

It's an intriguing scenario, though it doesn't strike me as working out as easily as he puts it. In the first place, McCain has had to shift somewhat, embracing both an enforcement-first position that his own campaign manager says is now the consensus of the party. It would be impossible for McCain to back away from that now.

Second, it wasn't just Republicans that killed the bill. More than a dozen Democratic senators were happy to have a chance to vote against it, and on the House side, plenty of conservative-leaning Democrats will be begging their leaders not to go Siskind's recommended route.

Still, given that McCain has said he still supports the bill he wrote with Sen. Ted Kennedy — yet also says that bill is dead — Democrats must be at least a little tempted to prove him wrong and bring it back, just to see what he does.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Some pundits have predicted that this year's Republican primary presages a fundamental split between evangelical conservatives and the party's more traditional strong defense, limited government wing.

I don't know whether there's an actual split, but there's no question there's a divide — and the latest evidence comes from SlateCard.com, which had a booth at last week's Conservative Political Action Conference: The issues John McCain's supporters said were driving them to support him were almost entirely different from the set of issues driving supporters to Mike Huckabee.

For McCain, the top four issues were related to security, cutting spending and being able to beat Hillary Clinton. Those accounted for about three-fourths of the 151 votes McCain got.

For Huckabee, the top four issues were entirely different: "Faith and values," the economy, the Fair Tax and pro-life causes accounted for about three-fourths of his 92 votes.

The fact that there was no overlap raises the question of what Huckabee voters do when McCain locks up the nomination, as he almost certainly will do now with Mitt Romney's delegates supporting him.

We wondered earlier this week (and you all responded enthusiastically) what would happen with Rep. Ron Paul's voters in the general election. Do Huckabee's voters face the same choice?

Paul got 46 votes in SlateCard's poll, and there was some overlap with the issues driving both McCain's and Huckabee's supporters. His top four issues were cutting pork, the economy, securing the borders and national security.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Audio: Listen to the interview

Is immigration a dead issue now in politics? After Sen. John McCain acknowledged his stance on the issue nearly killed his campaign last summer, his campaign manager now says they've reached "convergence," where the Republican Party shares the same view. That, said Rick Davis, the campaign manager, has helped immigration "mature" into a non-issue:

"I do believe that the convergence of our party on sort of a single approach to immigration is part of what has done that. In other words, today, there's a different debate going on than there was a year ago. And I think that part of that is because Senator McCain went out and exercised a position on this issue, vigorously, that didn't work. And he was not able to pass a piece of legislation that addressed the issue in away that he thought would benefit the country the most. Part of the message he got was how little confidence the American people have in the institution of Congress and the administration to implement that law. I don't think there's much other reason — you can debate the merits of it from a public policy point of view, but clearly the American public opposed it because I don't think they thought anything was going to get done. Now the issue is, we need to exert every resource we can as a government, whether Congress or the administration, to get control of our border before we can effectuate a real change in our immigration plans."

"It doesn't even come up in conversations. You hear a lot of things, immigration's not one of the hot topics anymore. So wihtin our own party I think that issue has matured into something that's less divisive."

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

The backdrop to Sen. John McCain's victory party in Alexandria last night has drawn some notice, including on blogs such as Politico's Jonathan Martin's. For some, the issue is that the assembled crew were either lame ducks or are already out of office. For others, the presence of Rep. Tom Davis and Sen. John Warner suggested a speedbump in McCain's outreach to conservatives.

But McCain's campaign doesn't see much need for outreach, and says the real story is conservatives reaching out to McCain. This is from Rick Davis, the campaign manager, speaking to reporters today, when asked if the campaign is considering some gesture to convince conservatives McCain is one of them.

"The grand gesture, I think, is really being made on the part of conservatives to John McCain, saying, we believe that you would make a good president and are willing to put our political capital to your disposal. I think that is an incredible, grand gesture."

Here's the answer in full:

"When you look at what has happened in the last two weeks, really since Super Tuesday, inside the McCain campaign and the McCain orbit, if you want to call it that, you've seen, heard, a landslide of high-profiile Republican conservatives supporting John McCain. And so, I think, without trying to parse it by who brought what to the table, it's every ideological mix. In other words, there are economic conservatives, there are defense hawks, there are social conservatives. Every single thread of the Republican blanket has covered John McCain."

(Davis interrupted his own stream of thought to tell reporters he was thrilled with having crafted that line: "That was pretty good, I kind of like that. That's got to go out in a release like in an hour, that's really good stuff.")

"The grand gesture, I think, is really being made on the part of conservatives to John McCain, saying, we believe that you would make a good president and are willing to put our political capital to your disposal. I think that is an incredible, grand gesture.

"You look at the response he's gotten at the CPAC event, you look at the people who have signed up, Ted Olson and others, who are symbolic to the movement, and they've said, I want to be part of the McCain operation, I want John McCain to be president. To me, that is the grand gesture. And I think John appreciates that a great deal and actually is very excited about having all these people come in to make a stronger campaign for him.

"Other than a few voices out there, I don't hear the demand for John McCain to be anything other than John McCain. I think there's a belief, regardless of your ideology, that what got him to securing this nomination, assuming we will secure the nomination, is exactly the same kind of campaigner that would make a good candidate in the general election."

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Exit polls from Tuesday's Potomac primaries show where Sen. John McCain's general election strengths and weaknesses lie in facing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama in November.

The exit polls asked primary voters if they would be satisfied with each candidate as the nominee. About 75 percent of Republican voters in Maryland and Virginia said they would be satisfied with McCain, and 81 percent of Democratic voters said they would be satisfied with Obama.

Coupled with the huge turnout he is inspiring, those numbers suggest that Obama could be looking at historic levels of support and McCain could be looking at a difficult campaign.

The good news for him is that Democrats are far less happy with Clinton. Only 64 percent of Virginia voters and 68 percent of Maryland voters would be happy with her, the exit polls found.

Still, Clinton received more than 300,000 votes in Virginia in a losing effort while McCain collected less than 250,000 votes in his winning effort, which means the enthusiasm gap might be too much for any Republican to overcome this year.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

How important is Ron Paul to Republicans' chances this year?

Maybe this stat from the Campaign Finance Institute helps answer that question: In the fourth fundraising quarter of 2007, Republicans finally outraised Democrats among individual donors — but only based on the strength of Paul's donors.

Without Paul's $20 million raised from individuals, Republicans would have totaled $45 million for the period from October through December, compared with Democrats' $58 million.

Paul also set the standard among candidates in both parties last year for tapping into average Americans. He raised 61 percent of his funds from small-dollar donors, defined as those who gave $200 or less, compared to just 14 percent of Hillary Rodham Clinton's funds, 12 percent of Mitt Romney's funds and 8 percent of Rudy Giuliani's 2007 campaign funds.

The question for Republicans is what happens to Paul's voters and donors. Though he has not yet won any state contests, he has garnered support from hundreds of thousands of voters, many of whom are nontraditional Republicans. There were even some pundits who said an uptick in polling on Republican affiliation resulted from Paul's outreach.

What Paul does to try to keep them in the Republican fold, and whether they are open to such an appeal, is anybody's guess.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Ron Paul today is echoing Mike Huckabee's vow to stay in the race, saying Republican voters deserve to have a choice other than Sen. John McCain.

"As the results of this weekend have made clear, many Republican voters are not satisfied with our party's likely candidate for president, John McCain," he said in a statement, pointing to McCain's losses in the Louisiana and Kansas contests to Huckabee as evidence.

Paul has not won a single state yet, but he said as long as his supporters keep backing him — and they have been generous with their financial contributions so far — he would stay in the race.

Paul also has a Web video up evaluating his campaign's successes and defending his less visible national presence right now.

He called for his supporters to continue to support him, including in his run for reelection to his congressional seat in Texas, as part of a national movement.

"We're running a race to save the country," he says in the video.

As for his presidential campaign chances, he said anything can happen: "We don't know what will happen. There may be a lot of information on the other two candidates that will come out."

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

The reports of Sen. John McCain's problems with conservative leaders have been well-established, but it turns out Mike Huckabee's problems may be even worse, according to the results of the straw poll at last week's Conservative Political Action Conference.

While 31 percent of those polled said they would not vote for McCain if he is the Republican nominee, 36 percent said they would stay home or vote for someone else if Huckabee were the nominee.

More than 1,500 people voted in the straw poll, which found support for McCain went up after Mitt Romney dropped out of the nomination race in a speech to the conference Thursday.

While Romney was still in the race, McCain won only 27 percent of votes in the straw poll, but after Romney dropped out McCain won 37 percent of votes. Only 12 percent of CPAC voters said they would support Huckabee, and that was consistent regardless of whether Romney was in the race, suggesting that Huckabee is not picking up many of Romney's supporters.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Those who saw signs of an endorsement of John McCain in President Bush's speech today to the Conservative Political Action Conference may have been looking at the wrong part of the speech.

While it's a certainty that Bush will work for McCain once he officially secures his party's presidential nomination, today's speech contained several implicit criticisms of the Arizona senator.

The president pointedly said his opponents on tax cuts and his embryonic stem cell funding policy — a la McCain — have been proved wrong by subsequent events.

On tax cuts, he said:

"Our critics wanted a different approach. They believed that the best way to keep the economy — to help the economy was to keep taxes in Washington and expand the size and scope of the federal government. ... Despite these dire predictions, the tax cuts we passed contributed to a record 52 months of job creation. They helped produce strong economic growth — and the increased revenues from that growth have put us on track to a balance our budget by 2012. Here is the bottom line: tax relief works."

And on stem cell research, he said his critics "thought my defense of life was short-sighted and harmful. When I vetoed two bills that sought to use tax dollars to destroy human embryos, some academics described my position as ridiculous and scientifically naive. One publication predicted our plan would not hold up over the long haul."

Bush went on to say that new research that shows potential for using adult skin cells for the same kind of research has proved him right.

Bush's speech repeatedly was interrupted by applause, and it was enthusiastic — the element that appeared to be missing from conservatives' reaction to McCain on Thursday.

Does that mean a rethinking of Bush's record has already begun? Possibly.

As one person in the audience for Bush's speech today put it: "People who may have been dissatisfied on certain issues now realize he's a lot better than the people likely to replace him."

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

That, in essence, sums up how some Republicans feel about John McCain's pitch for why they should support him.

He's made his argument that he sees eye-to-eye with them on the war and on cutting spending and on pro-life policies. But that has gone only so far, particularly when stacked up against his efforts over the last decade on campaign finance reform, global warming, immigration and his opposition to President Bush's tax cuts.

So his speech yesterday at the Conservative Political Action Conference boiled down to an appeal based on fear and loathing — of what the Democratic nominee, be it Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama, might do as president.

Here are some soundbites:

"Senator Clinton and Senator Obama want to increase the size of the federal government."

"Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will raise your taxes."

"Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will withdraw our forces from Iraq based on an arbitrary timetable designed for the sake of political expediency, and which recklessly ignores the profound human calamity and dire threats to our security that would ensue."

"Senator Clinton and Senator Obama will concede to our critics that our own actions to defend against its threats are responsible for fomenting the terrible evil of radical Islamic extremism, and their resolve to combat it will be as flawed as their judgment."

Is that fear enough to push those with reservations to McCain? Maybe not, judging by initial reactions.

But McCain has a few aces left to play, and one of them is Sen. Tom Coburn, whose conservative credentials are as impeccable as McCain's are questioned. He introduced McCain to CPAC yesterday, listing his reasons for backing his colleague:

"On judges, I wouldn't have endorsed John McCain if I wasn't confident he will nominate judges like the ones he has voted to confirm in the Senate: Bork, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. I also know that he shares my desire to see the Senate approve conservative judges now.

On immigration, John McCain was trying to solve a problem which, incidentally, hasn't improved much. He listened and learned and decided the facts were on our side. He doesn't have a secret plan to enact blanket amnesty as president. And, if he did, he knows I'd kill it.

McCain-Feingold misdiagnosed the real problem as too much money to politicians rather than politicians whose votes are for sale. Even though I disagreed with McCain-Feingold, John McCain's desire to tackle corruption in the congressional neighborhood was correct. The source of Washington's corruption isn't K Street; it's Congress' lack of restraint, and John McCain has taken bold steps to tackle that problem at its source.

Still, I have to say that the concerns I hear about John McCain pale in comparison to the two greatest challenges facing our country — terrorism and a Congress that refuses to correct our unsustainable fiscal course. If we get all of those other issues right but those two issues wrong we won't survive as a nation. John McCain's record on the issues that are paramount to our future is a record conservatives can support.

John McCain also has a conservative record on what is arguably the transcendent social issue of our time: the sanctity of life. He has been pro-life for 24 years and has record that matches his principles.

And on national security, John McCain is by far the most qualified candidate on either side. He will meet not only the security challenges we know about but, more importantly, those we don't know about. Tyrants and terrorists will think twice about challenging the United States with John McCain in the White House."

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

President Bush this morning closed his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference here in Washington with what may have seemed like an implicit endorsement of Sen. John McCain's conservative credentials.

"We've had good debates and soon we'll have a nominee who will carry a conservative banner into this election and beyond," Bush said, going on to tell the audience not to sit the race out.

"Listen, the stakes in November are high. This is an important election. Prosperity and peace are in the balance. So with confidence in our vision and faith in our values, let us go forward, fight for victory, and keep the White House in 2008," he said.

He never mentioned McCain by name — or Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul, who also are still running but have little hope of catching the Arizona senator. But to some CPAC attendees, his words sounded like a call to get behind McCain.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel later said that reading "would be wrong."

"We're approaching the time when we will have a Republican nominee," Stanzel told reporters traveling on Air Force One.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Mike Huckabee may be regionalized, but don't call him marginalized. His victories in five southern states yesterday blew a hole in the pundits' view of the race over the last week as a two-man showdown between Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Huckabee's wins in Arkansas, Alabama, West Virginia, Georgia and Tennessee show there's a pocket of the country where voters just aren't sure about the two guys with more name recognition and more money, but without the rock-solid pro-life positions they crave.

The problem for the other two candidates it that pocket of the country might also be called "Republican territory" — the place that provides the voter turnout phone calls, door-knockers and cheering backdrops that help Republicans win general elections.

It's also worth noting Huckabee's near-miss in Missouri, losing by 1 percent to McCain.

During the last week it was almost as if Huckabee was irrelevant to the race. That's certainly how the CNN/Politico/Los Angeles Times folks who hosted last week's debate in California treated him — something Huckabee joked about today on Fox News Channel.

"Heck, even on the debate, they put me over in the corner of the stage. I might as well have been off stage brought on for a brief wave," he said.

It's true that his presence in the race is preventing conservatives from unifying — Team Romney's argument — but those voters are not Romney's by birthright, they have to be earned. Huckabee has done just that. With five wins last night he deserves to be on the stage for more than a brief wave.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Conservatives just aren't feeling John McCain this year, at least not with two or three other options available to them.

In only one state — Connecticut — did he win self-identified conservatives, according to MSNBC's exit polls from the states that held primaries last night. He even lost, soundly, among conservatives in his home state of Arizona.

That's not to say he wasn't competitive in many of them, but he clearly has his work cut out if he is the nominee and wants to keep those voters in the Republican fold come November.

Here are the state breakdowns for first, second and third place in each state:

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

One early sign suggests that even with his approach on immigration, which favors a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens, Sen. John McCain might have trouble putting back together the coalition of Hispanic voters that helped President Bush win a second term.

A completely unscientific call-in poll to “Piolín Por la Mañana,” the nation's most popular Spanish-language radio program, found that 59 percent of the 819 folks who took part in the survey plan to back Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, 36 percent support Sen. Barack Obama and only 2 percent favor McCain.

McCain was supposed to be able to put back together the estimated 40 percent of Hispanics who voted for Bush's re-election four years ago. Support for Republicans among Hispanics tumbled in polls taken since then, and pollsters and Hispanic activists say the reason is that the party's congressional members are too harsh on immigrants.

McCain did do well among the Hispanics who voted in last week's Republican primary in Florida, winning more than half, according to exit polls. But the majority of those Hispanics were Cuban — a group crucial to Florida's vote but not as influential elsewhere in the country.

The real tests will come tomorrow, when we see how many Hispanics turn out to vote Republican in the contests in California, Arizona, New York and New Jersey. If the numbers are small compared to Democrats' totals, we'll know the Hispanic voters have fled.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

With Sen. John McCain as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, anticipate the war in Iraq making a comeback as a major campaign topic.

It's already begun, with antiwar groups planning a protest outside of McCain's campaign event this weekend in Connecticut. The groups, who for the last two years have kept reporters' e-mail boxes flooded with shots at President Bush, now are aiming those barbs at McCain, attacking him for his defense of the surge.

The Connecticut location for the protest shouldn't be surprising. McCain will be campaigning with Sen. Joe Lieberman, the former Democrat who was ousted in the 2006 Senate primary by antiwar voters in Connecticut, forcing him to run for and win re-election as an independent.

McCain was a vocal defender of the surge throughout. But because of the press attention that goes with a campaign, if McCain is the nominee, does he become the chief defender of the strategy, surpassing even Bush? And how will that work, with the president taking second billing on the chief legacy issue of his tenure?

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times