Ohio conservatives wary of McCain

CINCINNATI, June 9 (UPI) -- Ohio conservatives say presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's efforts to court those key swing state voters haven't worked well.

McCain, R-Ariz., is taking too long to get his efforts to motivate conservatives going, they say, adding they feel he's paying more attention to attracting moderate independent voters than in energizing the Republicans' core base of social conservatives, the Los Angeles Times said in a report Monday.

"There's no sense in this part of Ohio that John McCain is a conservative or that his election would have a material benefit to conservatism," Bill Cunningham, a conservative radio talk show host in Cincinnati, told the newspaper.

"He doesn't want to associate with us and we don't want to associate with him," Phil Burress, a Republican activist who succeeded in turning out large numbers of social conservatives for U.S. President George Bush in the 2004 election, told the Times.

The Times says McCain's campaign strategists are instead going after new Ohio voters to make up for a fall-off in hardcore conservatives, including blue-collar workers in Cleveland, Youngstown and in the state's low-income southeast corner who supported Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., in the primaries and won't vote for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the Democrats' presumptive nominee.