EATTLE - Starting with his victory in Michigan and continuing yesterday as he pressed his resurgent campaign in Washington, Arizona Senator John McCain dumped his broad appeals to Democrats in favor of burnishing his Republican credentials and bashing Al Gore.
McCain's campaign pitch has not been retooled now that the everyday do-or-die of the early primaries is over and as he faces an imperative to attract greater support among Republicans. But the tone is different; some emphasis has shifted.
In interviews and appearances yesterday, McCain emphasized his antiabortion, anti-big government, antitax positions, and punctuated his remarks with the sometimes serious, sometimes jocular moments of candor on which he built his reputation in New Hampshire.
At Gonzaga University in Spokane, he was asked about the controversy over the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina Capitol. He said his experience fighting for Martin Luther King Day in Arizona taught him that outside interventions sometimes hurt more than help. He could have let it go at that; instead, he made a point of saying his position was the same as his rival's, Texas Governor George W. Bush.
McCain has not gone soft on Bush, who recast himself as ''a reformer with results'' after McCain badly upset him in New Hampshire. Nor is he less willing to tell audiences things they may not want to hear.
''I know there are a lot of rich people in this area,'' he said in a luncheon speech to the Rotary Club of Seattle. ''But I don't think they need a tax break right now.''
The 450 Rotarians cheered heartily when he said the tax break ought to go to working families, and most of the rest of the federal surplus should be spent bolstering Social Security and paying down the national debt.
From the beginning, McCain has been the least-scripted of the major presidential candidates. His town hall meeting format is imitated by the other contenders, but none could match the free-wheeling style of the Arizonan.
Gradually, McCain came to concentrate on whatever the crowd wanted to talk about and assumed the voters knew his basic positions.
When the campaign started to go sour in South Carolina and Bush was scoring with charges that McCain was not really a conservative, the senator and his aides realized they had gone too far. McCain had to remind audiences of his basic Republican stances.
Now the reference to his antiabortion views gets worked into appearances whether he is asked about them or not. He compares himself to Ronald Reagan whether that comes up or not.
''We're going to get Republicans all over this country to know him the way Republicans in Arizona know him,'' said Mark Salter, McCain's chief of staff. In the Arizona GOP primary Tuesday, McCain defeated Bush 2 to 1, even though Bush had the backing of the state's Republican establishment and spent $2 million there while McCain spent $200,000.
After a disastrous venture into negative campaigning in South Carolina, McCain withdrew his negative ads and called on Bush to do the same. The governor declined, and the Michigan advertising contest pitted negative ads by the Bush camp against positive ads by the McCain campaign.
''Obviously the negative ads worked in South Carolina, but now people are alerted to it,'' McCain said yesterday on his campaign plane. ''That's why we won in Michigan.''
John Weaver, political director of the McCain campaign, said: ''We kind of got down in the weeds a little bit in South Carolina, throwing elbows down where Governor Bush and his supporters wanted us to be. ... We thought we had to respond not just to his ad but to the concerted attack being made by all his surrogates.
''We wanted to hit them hard. But McCain decided he didn't want to fight like that, and we moved on,'' Weaver said.
When the Bush attack turned to questioning McCain's Republican credentials, the senator insisted yesterday that he would not rise to the bait. He acknowledged that he must beef up his support among Republicans if he is to have a chance for the party's nomination.
''I'm just going to talk more about reforming government, education, the military, the tax code,'' he said. ''We have a chance now to get Republicans to take another look. ... I've got 13 days do do it.''
There is a harder edge to the recalibrated McCain campaign, too. Salter and Mike Murphy, the senator's chief strategist, said McCain's tough election night speech in South Carolina - interpreted by political pundits as a graceless blunder - was actually deliberate.
It was intended, they said, to signal to Bush, party leaders, and journalists that McCain will insist that Bush explain his embrace of the Christian right in South Carolina to Republicans in the rest of the country, where such groups are less popular.
''Bush went to Mars and won as a Martian,'' Murphy said yesterday, ''and now he wants to rub the green pigment off his skin. Well, he can't do that.''
McCain said he would turn his attention to developing his vision of the McCain majority that he says is emerging, based on the exit polls showing that 28 percent of those who voted for him in Michigan had never voted before.
''This whole campaign is about bringing you back into the political process,'' he told an enthusiastic, anti-Gore crowd at Gonzaga, a Jesuit university. ''The McCain majority means ... getting every young person in this room involved in the political process and to inspire all young Americans to become involved in causes greater than their own self-interest.''
McCain said that the up-and-down experience of New Hampshire and South Carolina had taught him a lesson.
''This is a great ride,'' he said of the campaign. ''I should appreciate it rather than get depressed or carried away. If you don't watch it, the more exuberant you get when you win and the more depressed you get when you lose. I'm going to keep a level approach.''
