&quotIndependent” Expenditures?;

That Bush has succeeded in maneuvering between his party’s Scylla and Charybdis is one reason he’s the GOP’s prohibitive front-runner. But both the RLC and the NRLC have paid a price for their pro-Bush efforts. Steve Forbes, John McCain, and their advisers have lashed out at these groups with a harshness otherwise absent from the Republican campaign.

The bad blood first erupted in mid-November, when the RLC shelled out $ 100,000 to flood the airwaves in Iowa and New Hampshire with a 30-second anti-Forbes television ad. It featured a woman speaking into the camera, saying, “When Steve Forbes ran for president last time, I kind of liked him. But then he spent all his money tearing down his opponents.” The ad went on to bemoan the likelihood that Forbes would air similar ads this year, and closed with the woman saying, “Someone needs to tell Steve Forbes that if he doesn’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

This was clever: a negative ad criticizing Forbes for running negative ads, even though he had yet to air any. The Forbes campaign pounced, charging that the spots “flirt dangerously with the laws governing our federal election process” and that the RLC is simply “an attack surrogate for the benefit of Governor Bush.”

Claiming that 28 out of the top 35 RLC supporters back Bush, the Forbes campaign demanded the RLC pull the ads. When it didn’t, Forbes began airing his own ads trashing the RLC as a “liberal” front for Bush. (The RLC promptly fired back with radio ads accusing Forbes of “twisting the facts” and noting that he once gave $ 10,000 to the group.) Forbes also filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, seeking an injunction that would force the ads to be withdrawn. A ruling may take years.

After all this buildup, the anti-Bush ad Forbes began airing a few weeks ago had little bite. But that didn’t stop the RLC from returning fire with another $ 100,000 buy in Iowa and New Hampshire. “Steve Forbes has a history of unfairly attacking fellow Republicans,” declares the RLC ad, alleging that his critique of Bush’s record on taxes “distorts the truth.”

And that set off more complaints from the Forbes campaign: The RLC is a “liberal pro-abortion . . . front group” being used by Bush “to make unethical personal attacks on Steve Forbes.” In a comical twist, Bill Dal Col, the Forbes campaign manager, invoked Bush’s service on his father’s 1988 primary campaign, implying W. was responsible for the “very negative ‘Senator Straddle'” ad that knocked Bob Dole out of the contest.

The Forbes campaign has every reason to be upset about the RLC, whose ads have been almost as dishonest as those Forbes ran against Dole four years ago. If the group really were dedicated to curbing intra-Republican squabbles, it would have criticized Bush’s recent ad against McCain.

But Forbes has not shown that the RLC broke the law by, say, coordinating with the Bush campaign. Yes, the group is dominated by moderate Bush backers (Christine Todd Whitman, George Pataki, etc.). And it’s clear they adore him because he looks like a winner, he opposes litmus tests, and, in the words of one executive committee member, “he won’t embarrass them when they announce at their dinner parties that they’re supporting him.” But even Georgette Mosbacher, an RLC member and a national co-chair of the McCain campaign, denies the group is just a stooge for Bush. “That’s ridiculous,” she told me.

McCain has wisely ignored the Forbes/RLC scrum. Meanwhile, he and his aides have been waging their own battle against the National Right to Life Committee and the Grover Norquist-led Americans for Tax Reform. These groups have been hitting McCain on a number of fronts. It’s not clear which side is scoring more effective blows — all are being sullied — but the beneficiary is Bush.

For most of his career in Congress, McCain has been viewed as a reliable pro-life vote, though not a crusader. He had reasonably friendly relations with pro-life groups and a few years ago spoke at a Christian Coalition convention held in Phoenix.

Everything changed, however, once he proposed radical campaign-finance reform in 1995. That’s because a number of groups, including National Right to Life, believe McCain’s bill would cripple their ability to engage in issue advocacy, which they believe helps elect pro-lifers to Congress. Thus, in the NRLC ratings of members of Congress, a vote for a campaign finance bill like McCain’s is scored as a pro-abortion vote.

McCain’s stance on campaign reform was destined to cause him trouble in the Republican presidential primaries, but his problems with the NRLC have only grown over the past six months. During an August 19 interview with editors from the San Francisco Chronicle, he said that even in the long term, he “would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade.” He then had to issue two “clarifications” before he found acceptable pro-life language. And in a November 23 interview with Don Imus, he derided people who vote solely on the basis of a candidate’s abortion stance.

More recently, in a CNN interview aired January 15, McCain mentioned Warren Rudman, a former New Hampshire senator, as a possible attorney general in his administration. Invoking Rudman — whose Senate memoir warned the GOP not to align itself with the “Christian right,” full as it is of “antiabortion zealots, . . . homophobes, bigots, and latter-day Elmer Gantrys” — has only bred further distrust among pro-life activists.

The National Right to Life Committee and its affiliates have responded by airing radio ads against McCain in the two states where he must do well: New Hampshire and South Carolina. The ads have pasted him on everything from campaign reform to his joke about Alzheimer’s. “If you want a strongly pro-life president,” conclude the ads, “don’t support John McCain.” The $ 100,000 of ads purchased by Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform are no less subtle. They charge that McCain’s top priority is “nationalized campaign laws that muzzle conservative voices.”

The McCain campaign is not amused. It has lobbed nasty charges at Norquist and even more at NRLC. One McCain adviser said of the group, “It’s quite something when you go from defending the unborn to policing political correctness.” Mike Dennehy, a senior McCain aide in New Hampshire, was even more scathing, telling the Concord Monitor that NRLC was running the ads “because they know he [McCain] will enact campaign finance reform and they will lose their six-figure salaries.” When NRLC’s ads began running in South Carolina, McCain’s campaign there characterized the organization as a “Washington-based special interest group” that had used “soft money” to pay for its advertising (a false charge, as it turns out). And McCain himself roasted NRLC for “attacking me recently and opposing a soft money ban,” which he says is “doing double harm to the pro-life movement.”

Behind closed doors, McCain aides ascribe other motives to NRLC, calling it “Austin East” and a “satellite office” of the Bush campaign. The sentiment is not confined to the McCain campaign. A top aide to another GOP presidential candidate, asked whether the NRLC had become a de facto arm of the Bush campaign, replied, “I don’t know why you say de facto. It’s official.”

That’s an exaggeration, but it’s not completely off the mark. For while Bush’s abortion-related rhetoric has been squishy on judges, platform language, a running mate, and overturning Roe, the NRLC is nonetheless comfortable with him and his record. The group’s officials first met him in 1987, when he was working on his father’s campaign. It was clear to them that his opposition to abortion was part of who he was. Darla St. Martin, a senior NRLC official, has met with him regularly ever since and says, “There’s never been any equivocation in his position.”

Pro-lifers cite Bush’s participation in getting a parental-notification bill through the Texas legislature last year as proof of his commitment to their cause. They also point to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, which reported recently that Texas and Michigan had enacted more anti-abortion measures in 1999 than any other state in a single year. NARAL has even aired a number of television ads in New Hampshire excoriating Bush, while ignoring every other Republican candidate.

In targeting Bush, NARAL has made the same simple calculation as both the National Right to Life Committee and the Republican Leadership Council: Bush is the favorite to become the Republican nominee, and it would be foolish to make the perfect the enemy of good. Translation: Gary Bauer, Steve Forbes, Orrin Hatch, and Alan Keyes all have stronger pro-life positions than Bush, but he’ll be the one who gets the nod if NRLC endorses a candidate during the primaries. (The RLC is unlikely to endorse for legal reasons, but its sympathies are not in doubt.)

The real question is whether Bush can carry off this tightrope walk through the rest of the primaries and, if he becomes the nominee, the general election. A test came January 20 in Iowa, when he was asked what he thought of the Roe decision, and he called it a “reach that overstepped the constitutional bounds.” That didn’t satisfy Bauer or NARAL, but neither the Republican Leadership Council nor the National Right to Life Committee took offense.

This success in navigating an issue as dicey as abortion, say Bush’s aides, proves he can win in November. They might be right.

BY MATTHEW REES