Read My Knuckles

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Against this deluge, McCain fought back with a positive TV ad comparing himself to Ronald Reagan. But McCain's morning-in-America spot was airing once for every six Bush commercials. McCain got some help from Gary Bauer, the Christian conservative candidate who folded his campaign after New Hampshire and endorsed McCain last week. Bauer is fighting Reed for supremacy among Christian conservatives, but last week he lost the battle. He wasn't popular enough to sway many votes. McCain's network of veterans tried to counter Bush's carpet bombing with a grass-roots ground campaign, but by Saturday morning, McCain knew in his bones that it was over.

In the hallway outside his hotel room that morning, McCain turned to his closest aide, Mark Salter. "We're going to lose this, aren't we?" McCain asked. Salter didn't have to answer. Inside the room, people started eating cold pizza from the night before, shaking their heads over reports that the state G.O.P had failed to open 21 polling places in black areas of Greenville. Later the team sat down and went over the exit polling. The candidate wanted to know about the attacks, so his ally, South Carolina Representative Lindsey Graham, ran through the list of the body blows McCain had absorbed. Cindy McCain broke into tears. "It's all right, Cindy," said McCain. "We can take it." By the time he had digested the results, McCain was smiling broadly--the mirror image of primary night in New Hampshire, when he had won so big yet couldn't manage a smile.

McCain still sees the battle that raged in South Carolina--and that this week spreads to Michigan and beyond--as a chance for an epochal party realignment, a ritual of G.O.P purification. But his party may not be ready for the purity he has in mind. As Bush and his aides see it, the party feud caused by McCain's surge is merely a minor, passing unpleasantness, not a long-term problem. And they believe the damage Bush did to his own image in South Carolina can be easily fixed. Says a senior Bush adviser: "We'll patch things up pretty quickly."

Not if McCain can help it. Despite the stinging loss, he went roaring out of South Carolina vowing that "our crusade grows stronger" and pitting "my optimistic and welcoming conservatism" against Bush's "negative message of fear." He added, "I want the presidency in the best way, not the worst way." Bush, stripped now of all his laid-back affectation, wants it any way he can get it. He's very good at gettin' by.

--Reported by James Carney with Bush, John F. Dickerson with McCain and Maggie Sieger/Detroit