“Republicans in the House have gone a long way [toward satisfying conservatives] with votes on the stimulus,” says Gary Bauer, president of the anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage group American Values. “But when it comes to the Senate, there are still a lot of people not convinced that … what people expect is for them to carry the banner of our philosophy as boldly and with as much confidence as the other side does.”

“The other side does not agonize about whether they are going to give a Republican Supreme Court nominee a difficult time, they just do it.”

Conservatives remember Sen. Ted Kennedy’s ferocious attack on “Robert Bork’s America,” the pubic-hair-on-the-Coke-can humiliations visited upon Clarence Thomas and the way that Samuel Alito’s wife cried after Sen. Lindsey Graham recounted the Democrats’ charges against her husband.