Adele M. Stan is a regular contributor to IntellectualCapital.com. She is the Washington correspondent for Working Woman magazine.

As Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore bask in the glow of klieg lights and their victories in the Super Tuesday presidential primary contests, the true victor of the season sits unaccosted at his Virginia compound, going about his usual business of drumming dollars from the faithful via a television network of his own making. This victory must be especially sweet for Christian Coalition President Pat Robertson who, before he baited the phenomenal Republican insurgent Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) into a spectacular tailspin, was widely regarded by the national media as the washed-up remnant of an era gone by.

While in this presidential campaign season, Robertson may not have proven himself as the GOP king-maker he has always imagined himself to be, he has emerged once again as a figure to be feared by those within the party of Lincoln who would dare to challenge him. The Republican leadership felt it needed Robertson to get its anointed candidate over the South Carolina finish line, but it may soon find that even as Robertson's help saved the party's favorite son, it served mostly to strengthen the televangelist at the party's expense.

McCain vs. McCain

On the eve of the Virginia primary, the state where Robertson makes his home, things looked less than great for McCain in the commonwealth, and he apparently felt he had little to lose there. Polls showed him trailing his rival and Robertson's pick, Bush. Looking northward at the many Eastern states whose delegates were at stake on Super Tuesday -- states where the Republican base is of a more moderate ilk and where the resentment against the religious right is strong -- McCain made his strike, calling upon Republican voters in a speech at Virginia Beach to repudiate Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

In the Northeast, the old-style Republicans -- those folks for whom the term conservative once meant a socially libertarian, free-trade, anti-communist agenda -- could have seen in McCain a liberator for their party. And, as McCain's victories in four New England states revealed, many of them did.

McCain; he just couldn't stop talking

But McCain just couldn't drop it. At each stop in his Super Tuesday stumping, McCain upped the ante, grossly underestimating the influence of the religious right in pockets of California. He also misjudged the alliances formed long ago between the religious right and conservative Catholics in New York state, where McCain would ultimately lose the Catholic vote by nine points, according to a Voter News Service exit poll. It was no mere accident of geography that Bush chose Archbishop of New York John Cardinal O'Connor to hear his mea culpa for not having chided the Bob Jones University folks for their anti-Catholic views; O'Connor is an old friend of Pat Robertson's. In the early '90s, the two joined forces against a gay-friendly curriculum that had been proposed for New York City pubic schools, concluding in a flap that ended with the resignation under fire of the city's superintendent of schools.

California Catholics were even less amenable to McCain's attempts to play the Belfast card. There, much of the Catholic population is Latino, thereby lacking the history of religious discrimination remembered by East Coast Catholics. In fact, Latino Catholics often find they have more in common with Protestant evangelicals than Catholics of European descent; indeed the church has been struggling to prevent growing numbers of defections of Spanish-speaking Americans to pentacostal sects. Ultimately, California's Catholic Republicans would fall to Bush by a 17-point margin, according to Voter News Service.

Writing off the right

Then McCain referred to Robertson and Falwell as "forces of evil," and he lost his bid, once and for all, then and there.

"That remark displayed a total lack of understanding of evangelical culture," explains Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, an organization that tracks and analyzes right-wing groups. "To born-again Christians, 'evil' means something very real."

In essence, what McCain failed to understand was that what born-again Christians and charismatic Catholics were hearing in his remarks was an assertion that Robertson was an agent of Satan himself. Even to religious folks who have their doubts about Robertson, that's an incendiary charge that tars Robertson's followers as soldiers in Satan's army. And thus, thousands of people who may have been inclined to sit this one out -- whose response to Bush had been tepid in many places -- found their way to the polls for no other reason than to vote against the senator from Arizona.

According to several figures active in the religious right, McCain too quickly wrote off the religious right as a constituency he could draw upon. One former Christian Coalition official, who spoke anonymously, explained, "The Bush name, just like the Dole name, causes most conservatives to apply the brakes -- rightfully so, whether you're talking about Bob Dole or Elizabeth Dole, or Governor Bush or Father (former President) Bush."

McCain, after all, has an A+ voting record on issues on which the grass roots of the religious right are focused. Robertson's antipathy toward McCain stems from the senator's championing of campaign-finance reform that would prevent the Christian Coalition and its counterparts on the left from influencing the agendas of political parties with soft money. A door was left open for McCain, this former operative insists, by many among the grass roots of the religious right, but McCain slammed it shut with his continued attacks.

In his initial lob, McCain tried to be cautious, making a distinction between Robertson and Falwell on one side (bad, according to McCain), and Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Rev. Chuck Colson, the Watergate felon who now conducts a prison ministry (both good religious righties in McCain's book).

Why, then, I asked Randy Tate, former executive director of the Christian Coalition and now director of Republican affairs with Voter.com, did religious right folks who are not allied with Robertson take offense at McCain's remarks in Virginia Beach? "You know what?" he asks. "You know when you make a speech like that that praising Dobson and Colson line is not going to show up in the paper." Well, actually the praise line was reported in the papers, but it was not the sound bite that made the nightly news.

Why did Gary Bauer's endorsement do him so little good, I asked my anonymous source. "Gary Bauer has become, I don't know, a gadfly, laughable," says the former Christian Coalition lieutenant. "I think that most people thought that he lost his mind running for president, and him endorsing McCain is a confirmation of that. He's politically tone-deaf."

In fact, this source says, his endorsement of McCain has left Bauer completely isolated on the right, even shunned by Dobson, his one-time patron. The Family Research Council, the organization Bauer headed until his presidential run -- and the vehicle for the hours of face time Bauer once enjoyed on the political talk shows -- will not even take him back, says the source, who claims that the organization has launched a search for Bauer's replacement.

Smash goes the party

So ends the insurgency campaign of McCain, with the Republican Party fractured, as is the religious right itself. As the GOP struggles to its feet amid the exhaust fumes left by the Straight Talk Express, it will no doubt find the landscape changed by the incursion. But don't look for McCain to be crying in his beer. Should the Democrats take the White House again in 2000, look for McCain to be back in 2004 -- this time in a party that may be reshaped to his liking, for while Pat Robertson appears to have won this battle, he may have lost the war. How much more damage will the GOP be able to sustain at his hands before the party leaders turn on him?

Amid the chaos of today's Republican Party, delicious possibility exists: Should McCain demur next time, this rock-ribbed conservative may have just altered the terrain enough to allow for a moderate to win the Republican presidential nomination four years down the line. Who says religion and politics don't mix?