John McCain’s troubles with the right wing opinion-making elite of the Republican party are continuing unabated, as the comments of Focus on the Family head James Dobson reminded us again this week. (”I have seen no evidence that Sen. McCain is successfully unifying the Republican Party or drawing conservatives into his fold. To the contrary, he seems intent on driving them away.”) The ur-right publisher Alfred Regnery is still grousing about him too, and talk radio remains auspiciously unimpressed. Both The Wall Street Journal and The Nation published updates this week on McCain’s half-hearted courtship of their blessings.

But there’s one segment of the Republican right where McCain has fared much better, as Stephen Dinan of The Washington Times wrote earlier this week — the bloggers, with whom McCain or his surrogates have chatted regularly via conference call:

[Official McCain website blogger Patrick]  Hynes said the back-and-forth with bloggers took ‘a great deal of sting out of the criticisms’ over immigration, Mr. McCain’s push for campaign-finance changes and other areas where conservatives have registered their discontent with the senator, who has secured enough delegates to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

“‘It gave him a microphone when others had already left the building,’ said David All, one of the Republicans’ Web pioneers who runs SlateCard.com and who said Mr. McCain has benefited from Mr. Hynes’ ties to bloggers. ‘That very much symbolizes the role of bloggers: We don’t have editors to report to, and there isn’t a big meeting with editors every morning. What that comes down to is personal relationships.’”

McCain has gotten good mileage out of these calls, as these posts at Captain’s Quarters,  Townhall and Race42008 attest.