IT IS going to take more than last night’s Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary for the Republicans to fall in love with a winner and, in the eyes of some party supporters, the blame lies with President George W Bush.

David Jones, the retired owner of a B&B in Aiken, South Carolina, finally decided to back Senator John McCain a few days ago because, he said, “I don’t like the other candidates much”.

In 2000 Jones voted for Bush over McCain in the South Carolina primary. “I’d vote for Bush again if he was running. I admire him for standing up for his principles,” Jones said.

He was concerned, however, that the president had failed to identify a successor the party could rally behind. Hanging on to Dick Cheney as vice-president in his second term left the Republicans in the unusual position of lacking an heir apparent.

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“I’m a little disappointed with the things Dick Cheney has done and it’s left the party in a muddle,” Jones said. “All the candidates are dragging each other down.”

In the absence of a sitting president or vice-president running as the “establishment” candidate against an “insurgent” challenger, the Republican presidential campaign remains extraordinarily volatile.

Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, said: “George Bush has not been as concerned about a successor as he should have been and nor has Karl Rove [his adviser]. They failed in that.”

The heir was supposed to be Jeb Bush, the president’s brother, or Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of state, or Cheney himself, Barnes noted. But Bush concentrated on shoring up support for the US troop surge in Iraq among the leading candidates instead of anointing a successor, not least because of his own unpopularity at the time. “When everybody entered the race, nobody wanted to be the Bush candidate,” Barnes said.

Grover Norquist, the influen-tial conservative activist, said the Republicans had once benefited from Bush’s decision to appoint “somebody like Cheney with a heart condition who could not run”.

“One of the reasons the Democrats had trouble in 2004 is that every ambitious Democrat, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, had an interest in John Kerry losing, whereas every Republican with any ambition wanted George Bush to win,” he said.

Norquist believes that McCain was the obvious “establishment” candidate early on, despite his maverick reputation: “He was the guy who had run before and was next in line and somebody else was going to be the ‘challenger’, but then his campaign fell apart.”

McCain has since restored his position as favourite to win the Republican nomination, but not before allowing the rest of the field to catch up with him.

According to Norquist, it will be tougher for Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and Baptist minister, to make headway in states beyond the South “because he has the scarlet E for evangelical put on his head by opponents and supporters alike”.

Even evangelicals have some reservations about Huckabee. “This is the Baptist belt,” said Ben Wheeler, 20, a member of South Carolina’s national guard, at a rally in Charleston last week. “He has really strong morals, something that has been lacking in politics.” But his friend Jules said Huckabee’s new antiimmigration stance was over the top.

Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, won the Nevada caucuses yesterday, notching up yet another victory after winning Michigan last Tuesday. He was the only candidate to mount a serious campaign in Nevada and was helped by the presence of a significant Mormon, Republican-voting community. Although it is helping him to stack up delegates in advance of the Republican national convention, it is not expected to provide him with much momentum.

Republicans are alarmed by an “enthusiasm gap” with the Democrats. Some 50% of voters now identify themselves with the Democrats, as opposed to 36% with Republicans.

In South Carolina, McCain was more concerned to bury Romney than to defeat Huckabee. He was aiming to knock Romney out and grab his votes. Charles Black, McCain’s senior adviser, said the Republican primary in Florida on January 29 would now be “huge for us”.

“Whoever wins there will get big momentum,” he said. “But it’s a four-way race.”

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, spent all last week in Florida. The lack of a clear-cut national frontrunner has led some to speculate that his “mad genius” strategy of losing five races in a row before pulling off a potential string of victories in big states such as New York, New Jersey and California on February 5, “Super Tuesday”, might yet come off.

However, it can only hope to work if Giuliani wins convincingly in the “sunshine state”. He has made himself so irrele-vant to the national debate that he is running three points behind McCain in the polls and only two or three points ahead of Huckabee and Romney.

Both Giuliani and McCain are scrambling to refocus their campaigns away from national security and the war in Iraq and onto the economy. It was only last month that McCain made the damaging admission that “the issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I could”.

In South Carolina, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by former congressman Jack Kemp, a champion of tax cuts. “He made a mistake but it’s not fatal,” said Kemp, referring to McCain’s former opposition to Bush’s tax cuts – opposition that angered Republican activists.

Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma senator and a supporter of strong fiscal discipline who opposes McCain’s liberal views on immigration, also joined him on the campaign trail. Coburn’s presence, like Kemp’s, suggested that Republicans were beginning to coalesce around the most likely winner in the big states.

Speaking on McCain’s campaign bus as it travelled through South Carolina, Coburn said: “If you look back over history, it doesn’t portend well for us when there isn’t a vice-president running, but America’s disgust with politics has never been higher.”

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