REPUBLICANS are warming to John McCain as the politician most likely to beat Hillary Clinton to the White House in 2008 and to clear the party of the taint of sleaze.

A poll last week showed McCain could trounce Clinton, the Democrat favourite, by 52% to 36%. The 16-point lead reveals that he has a decisive advantage among independents and swing voters.

“The more scandal and corruption in Washington, the better it is for McCain. He is at a high point right now,” said Chuck Todd, editor-in-chief of National Journal’s Hotline news service, which commissioned the poll.

The Arizona senator’s standing among Republican activists nosedived after he was beaten by George W Bush to the presidential nomination in a bitter race in 2000.

However, McCain went on to stake out an independent position on the war in Iraq, which he considers to have been botched, and he led a successful campaign in Congress to ban the use of torture and the cruel and degrading treatment of detainees.

Republicans have found the maverick senator indispensable in their struggle against the blues that have afflicted Bush’s second term. McCain is at the centre of every debate, where his hawkish views on the war on terror, Iraq’s future and a nuclear Iran — and his criticism of government overspending — have won him respect.

In Congress he is leading his party’s efforts to get out of a mire over lobbying and corruption after Jack Abramoff, a Republican lobbyist, was indicted for attempting to bribe politicians.

Republican senators are queueing up to support McCain’s reform bill, which would ban privately funded travel by members of Congress and impose stricter limits on gifts from lobbyists.

Karl Rove, Bush’s electoral guru, warned leaders of the Republican national committee at their winter convention in Washington on Friday that sleaze could cost them power. He said the party needed to learn from the Democrats that it could lose its dominant status “when political power becomes an end in itself”.

Rove helped to scupper McCain’s chances of becoming the Republican presidential candidate by fighting a no-holds barred dirty war against him. Rumours surfaced that McCain, a war hero who was imprisoned during the Vietnam war, had fathered an illegitimate black child and later he was denounced as the “fag” candidate when he met a group of gay Republicans.

In Washington, where Republican leaders had gathered to hear Rove, anti-McCain sentiment was softening. Karl Ohs, the Montana party chairman, said: “If I thought he had the best chance of winning, I would support him.”

The Republican base is also revising its opinion. Byron York, of the conservative journal National Review, claimed McCain was “dominating what might be called the invisible primary of the activists and insiders who play key roles in the presidential primaries”.

McCain said that he was amused by his growing popularity. “I think it proves if you live long enough, anything can happen,” he said.

It was a risky joke as McCain’s main obstacle to the White House may be his age. In 2008 he will be 72, older than Ronald Reagan when he became president.

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