Shaftan knew that the opposition was crackling with energy, and that worried him, because he sees the activists as the key to victory. "When I get all the whackos together and they're all juiced up, I always win," he said. "Bush treats everybody here like we're all a bunch of nuts."

"I've polled on this guy, and I can't believe how weak his numbers are," Shaftan continued. "Have you talked to anyone here who defends Bush? It's only people under 25." He pumped his fist and grunted mockingly, "Bush the man!"

Of course, there were plenty of people at CPAC willing to defend Bush. Grover Norquist, powerful right-wing strategist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, said that "economic conservatives should be delighted" with Bush because of his tax cuts. Among the college students, there was still enormous enthusiasm for the war in Iraq -- the fervor was so great that some, like 18-year-old John Bascom, had even briefly considered joining the military. (Why did he decide against it? "I didn't think I was the right type of person," he explained.) And social conservatives were largely pleased that Bush had nodded toward a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in his State of the Union speech.

Introducing Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, right-wing radio host Armstrong Williams said: "I am so proud of the president. I'm so impressed by what he said, that marriage is between a man and a woman. Howard Dean says God spoke to him about same-sex marriage. My only question is, what God is that? Definitely not the God we serve."

Chao gave a speech in which she tried to rile the crowd against the growing threat of nongovernmental organizations, which she said are working to "promote global social and cultural values." NGOs, she warned, "should be at the top of every conservative watch list." She didn't mention which NGOs she was talking about, but she did give an example of their nefarious influence. One of them, apparently, filed a friend of the court brief in Lawrence vs. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that ruled anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional. One of the judges in the case, Chao said, "relied on research supplied by this NGO to justify his support for this new constitutional right."

Chao's speech probably resonated with the significant faction of CPAC attendees for whom sodomy is the most urgent issue facing the nation. (The group Bascom belongs to, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, put out a flier comparing the Lawrence decision to Sept. 11). Ultimately, though, she failed to deflect the attendees' anger away from the administration and onto villains like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

That anger was focused on Bush's economic policies and his expansion of entitlements. At a panel titled "GOP Success: Is it Destroying the Conservative Movement?" Devine said, "I'm probably going to end up voting for George Bush, but let's not kid ourselves." He then listed presidents -- including Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter -- who were better than Bush on domestic spending. "The bottom-line fact," Devine concluded, "is they're not going in the right direction." The crowd applauded.

Surprisingly, factions of the movement with very different agendas shared this sentiment. Even as Bush's runaway spending and expanding deficits infuriated small-government libertarians, his immigration proposal outraged right-wing populists who want the government to intervene to protect American workers.

After Malkin spoke, it fell to Daniel Griswold from the libertarian CATO Institute to defend Bush's immigration policy against a furious audience. His laissez-faire argument about matching willing workers and employers met with only tepid applause. He was followed by Schlafly, whose denunciation of the downward pressure on wages caused by globalization won standing ovations. "It's a terrible betrayal of American workers to make us compete with cheap labor from the rest of the world," she cried while the crowd cheered. Suddenly, the lower-middle-class rage that Republicans have so effectively deflected toward supercilious elites and parasitic minorities was turning back on the GOP.

Shaftan has seen the same thing. "I was in Arkansas, in a bar with a big Confederate flag on the wall," he said. It was full of good old boys, none of them fans of Clinton, who had turned on the president. They told Shaftan, "Fuck Bush. The economy sucks and he's letting all the damn wetbacks in."

Typically, Republicans facing this kind of populist anger divert it with a culture war, and several speakers suggested that's what we'll see this year. Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, gave a speech in which he accused supporters of gay marriage of "religious bigotry," saying, "Those who say I must turn my back on the tenets of my faith in order to be accepted by them are the ones who are intolerant."

Later, at a panel called "Previewing the 2004 Elections," Jeff Bell, a lobbyist who pushed for Bush's 2001 tax cuts and his faith-based initiatives, acknowledged that the upcoming election was going to be a rough fight. "Democrats are wising up," he said. "They're not going to be the sitting ducks that Max Cleland and others were in 2002," referring to the former Georgia Democratic senator who lost three limbs in Vietnam but was nonetheless tarred as a traitor by Republicans.

When it looked like Howard Dean was going to be the nominee, Bell said, Republicans "didn't have to worry about the base and the base's morale." But he worried that Kerry or Edwards would pose bigger challenges. "To keep his base exercised the president will have to bite the bullet and come out for specific measures to preserve traditional marriage," said Bell.

That will oblige the people at the Traditional Values coalition, who, as part of their anti-gay marriage display, had a woman dressed as a bride serving wedding cake. The group's chairman, Rev. Lou Sheldon, sees gay marriage as a sign of approaching apocalypse, saying, "Babylon is symbolic of promiscuity, hedonism and homosexuality." Sheldon says he has a weekly conference call with the White House about the issue, and is confident that the president will respond to grass-roots pressure.

It's unclear, though, if that will be enough to satisfy those disappointed with the administration in so many other ways. "The only way I'd vote for Bush," said Jeffrey Becker, a 41-year-old engineer from West Virginia, "is if Hillary got in the race."

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