There goes Lindsey, again: South Carolina conservatives are tired of senator Graham's act.

THERE'S a little joke, a throwaway line, really, that South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham often uses when he addresses audiences in his home state. "We change senators every 50 years," Graham says. "Thanks for the job."

Audiences usually smile at the allusion to Graham's long-serving predecessors in the Senate, Strom Thurmond and Ernest Hollings. But these days, among some conservative activists in the South Carolina Republican party, Graham's joke is wearing a little thin. We decide how long senators keep their job, those activists say. And watch out, Senator Graham--there's no guarantee you'll get those 50 years.

In the last few weeks, unhappiness with Graham has been running high after his open challenge to George W. Bush on the issue of terrorist detainees. It was, in fact, the mood of the day when the party's executive committee met in Columbia on September 16. "There was pretty strong frustration," recalls attendee Cyndi Mosteller, chairman of the Charleston County GOP (and a Graham supporter). "There's been a general sense of strong disagreement with his challenging of Bush on that issue" (the detainees).

"I spent days in phone banks to get Senator Graham elected here in South Carolina," says Kristin Maguire, another party activist who was at the meeting. "To have someone you worked that hard for--it's very frustrating that the guy we sent up there to work with President Bush ends up being a thorn in his side."

"It was like, 'There he goes again,'" says yet another activist who was there. "He keeps poking at his own party or poking at the president."

They are not isolated examples. "A lot of people have been talking about Lindsey being off the reservation lately," says David Woodard, a political scientist at Clemson University who managed Graham's first and second campaigns for Congress, in 1994 and 1996. "They are real discouraged with his lack of support for the president, and with mid-terms coming up the feeling is that Lindsey has helped the cause of the Democrats and hurt the cause of the Republicans."

Things got so intense that, on September 21, when the Greenville News ran a front-page story headlined, "Graham Under Fire for Tribunal Stand," the lead of the story speculated about a Republican challenge to Graham in 2008. The senator's stand on detainees, the paper reported, had become "the catalyst for dissident conservatives to begin discussing the possibility of wooing Ambassador David Wilkins [a prominent state political figure who is now ambassador to Canada] to challenge his 2008 renomination."

It seems unlikely that Wilkins will lead the charge--he hasn't shown much interest in it--and another person who has been mentioned as a potential challenger to Graham, state treasurer candidate Thomas Ravenel, recently said he wouldn't run against the senator, either. But a lot of political observers now believe that somebody will challenge Graham in the 2008 Republican primary. And that challenger will find support among some of the state's most conservative voters.

Criticism from the right has forced Graham into damage-control mode. In his speeches at home, he has been emphasizing his agreements with President Bush. And in a recent op-ed in state newspapers, he portrayed himself as standing side-by-side with the president. "President Bush and I shared the same goal," he wrote. "President Bush and I both want to put terrorists on trial.... From the start, I agreed with President Bush on 90 percent of his proposed solution."

Talk like that will probably help cool things down. But there's no doubt the detainee matter has done some damage to Graham. The question is, will the damage prove fleeting, or will it be more lasting?

With Graham, that's a complicated question. The answer lies not just in voters' feelings toward Graham but also in their feelings toward his closest ally in the Senate, John McCain of Arizona, who needs to win the South Carolina primary if he is to clinch the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. At the peak of the detainee standoff, the state GOP headquarters in Columbia received between 150 and 200 e-mails--quite a large number--blasting Graham, and also McCain. State officials hadn't received so many angry messages since conservative activists accused the Senate leadership of backing down on the "nuclear option" in the standoff over the president's judicial nominees. People say they've gotten tired of what one of Graham's colleagues in Washington called "The John and Lindsey Show."

Though the irritation is real, aides and advisers to both senators see the latest controversy as a minor blemish in an otherwise encouraging political scene. "The last time I did polling, [Graham] was the most popular Republican in the state," says Richard Quinn, who is McCain's top pollster and strategist in South Carolina. "He's fine. This two-week technical dispute over legal issues that weren't at all understood by the country--I think that controversy is over now."

Graham's spokesman, Kevin Bishop, says much the same thing. He also points out that there were lots of complaints about the senator in 2000, when he sided with McCain in the state's very rough presidential primary. "After that race, there were people who wrote that Lindsey Graham had irreparably harmed his chances of being in the U.S. Senate," Bishop says. "Two years later, the first time the seat came open in 48 years, he won without a primary and was elected with 54 percent of the vote."

It's probably true that there won't be any lasting damage from the detainee dustup. But the problem for Graham and McCain is not this most recent conflict. The problem is that such conflicts have become a recurring affair; conservatives in South Carolina feel certain that in the next couple of years, Graham and McCain will find other ways to irritate the Republican base. And that, they say, points to a bigger problem: Graham and McCain's true weakness is not that they're not conservative enough--both men have solid enough records on that score--but that they are overly fond of the publicity they receive when they break with their own party.

Just look at the detainee standoff. Throughout the negotiations on terrorist interrogation, Graham and McCain weren't really all that far from the White House. Some of their differences were barely differences at all: They wanted to allow most aggressive interrogating techniques, only with a different legal justification than the one favored by White House lawyers. There was an important disagreement involved, but it hardly needed to be the stuff of a major standoff.

At the same time, the president's opponents in the Democratic party and in the media were projecting onto Graham and McCain their desire for someone to take a courageous stand against the misdeeds of George W. Bush. Media reports portrayed Graham and McCain as doing just that, and the two men--the Republican rebels--basked in the positive publicity.

That's the picture conservatives in South Carolina saw on television, and they didn't like it. And then, when the detainee-treatment agreement was reached and it became clear that the differences between the senators and the president had been relatively small, people began to wonder: What was that all about? For some, the answer was that it was about posturing from Graham and McCain. That's not entirely true--there were some serious issues involved--but it's not an unreasonable way to read the situation if you're looking at it from South Carolina.

And so what really got Graham into hot water with voters at home was not the substance of his stand on the detainee matter but the way he and McCain played to the national media. "Folks in the base, they see that, and they say, 'Look, you've got a problem, you go talk to the president privately,'" says one local Republican pol. '"Don't do this in public, especially six weeks before an election.'" Conservatives in South Carolina don't believe Graham is soft on terrorism, but they do believe he's too eager to win the approval of the New York Times and the network newscasts. "People laugh and joke," says the GOP pol, "but I think the conservative base here is just getting a little fed up."