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Bush, once the lone front runner, is now in a two-front war. He must appeal to home-schooling Evangelicals in Waterloo, Iowa, even as he reaches out to socially moderate soccer moms in Nashua, N.H. He must halt McCain's surge in New Hampshire, but he cannot take victory for granted in Iowa, where being organized counts for more on caucus night than doing well in early polls, and where Forbes is dumping huge sums of money into the most sophisticated campaign organization in state history. "No question," says Iowa G.O.P. chairman Kayne Robinson, "Forbes is going to turn out a lot of people on caucus night." A loss or a weak victory in Iowa, followed by a McCain upset in New Hampshire, is the scenario that keeps Bush's team up at night.
Bush's broad appeal to voters of all stripes is still his biggest asset. But it takes a lot of energy to maintain. Bush has stretched himself so thin to span the issues that his support tends to be shallow; voters who like him often can't say why. But if his ideology--a dab of conservatism here, a touch of moderation there--remains difficult to pin down, that is precisely the idea. His self-styled New Republican approach continues to draw supporters from across his party's ideological spectrum. By emphasizing issues like education, for example, Bush is attracting women voters at levels other Republicans can only envy. He is even winning favorable reviews from a majority of moderate and conservative Democrats, according to data collected by the Pew Research Center. And while he has lost ground in New Hampshire, Bush is still the favorite of conservative Republicans in national polls. "Bush is a conservative who doesn't scare moderates," brags a top adviser, who insists that Bush can lose New Hampshire to McCain and still cruise to the nomination. "Our message doesn't just resonate with one target group; it resonates with all of them."
Indeed, Bush's success so far comes in part from nourishing political yearnings on both sides of his party. He sounds almost like a Democrat when he says saving Social Security is a high priority, but he makes like a conservative Republican when he adds that privatizing part of the system is the way to do it. In his Meet the Press interview, Bush broke with his party by endorsing the right of patients to sue their HMOs, but he burnished his social-conservative credentials by declining to meet with the leading group of gay Republicans. He's against hate-crimes legislation aimed at protecting minorities, gays and women, but he's for set-aside programs that give 10% of government contracts--and maybe more--to firms owned by women and minorities as long as there are no "quotas."
Bush would increase the size and funding of the Department of Education, heresy to social conservatives, who would prefer to see the agency abolished. But if a public school fails to meet standards after three years, he would cut off its federal funds and turn the money over to parents in the form of vouchers, allowing them to send their kids to private school. He satisfies the right by praising conservative Supreme Court stalwarts Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas but sticks by his pledge not to use a pro-life "litmus test" in picking court nominees. And even as he promises tax cuts, a G.O.P. staple, he swears he will work hard to close the gap between society's "haves and have-nots."