It was all the way back in November when Californians last saw Governor George W. Bush in their state. It was the cuddly governor they met then, the "compassionate conservative" who was going to unite Republicans, attract independents and Democrats, create the coalition that could return the White House to the Republican Party in 2000.

Encouraging unwed fathers to take responsibility for their children, Mr Bush spoke of "armies of compassion". "We love the babies," he said, "We love the babies."

This week, Mr Bush returned to California and seemed eager to have voters here forget about his recent transformation from a baby-loving moderate into a darling of the Christian Coalition. There was no hardline talk about opposing abortion without exception. There was no mention of his alliance with the Rev Pat Robertson, the Christian fundamentalist television preacher. This was California after all, not South Carolina, and Mr Bush is running a very different campaign here.

Returning to his compassionate conservative persona, visiting an inner city interdenominational ministry in central Los Angeles. "It's important for the people in America to see what can happen when you hear the universal call to love your neighbour," Mr Bush told a panel at the Los Angeles International Dream Center.

Later on in the day, Mr Bush sounded like Mr Tolerance when asked whether he would allow gay people to serve in his administration. Previously, Mr Bush has sounded a hard voice on gay rights, even implying during one of his debates with Senator John McCain that Mr McCain was the choice of gay voters.

If he learned someone was gay, and "if we agreed on issues and they were doing a good job, they'd stay", he said. Mr Bush spent much of the day courting Latino voters. He held a town hall meeting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a Jesuit school with a strong Irish-Catholic presence, that was broadcast to Spanish language television stations across the state.

That last strategy - focusing on Latino voters here - is an interesting one for Mr Bush. He speaks Spanish fluently, and is attempting to play on that strength. But only one in four registered voters in California are Republicans - and polls show that most are Catholic as well as moderate conservatives. His focus on the Latino vote is a clear sign he is trying to expand his appeal beyond conservative Republicans in this state.

California should have been an easy win for Mr Bush, particularly for the kind of candidate he appeared to be early on. In fact, he is still the odds-on favourite here for several reasons, not the least of which is the size of the state. It takes 10 hours to drive from the top of northern California to the southern-most position of the state which borders Mexico. Unlike smaller states such as New Hampshire, candidates here cannot meet most of the voters in person. They must rely on expensive television advertising - and Mr Bush still has greater resources than Senator McCain.

But California's Republican Party - not to mention its Democrats and Republicans - also shows a quirky streak. The same state that produced Ronald Reagan also produced Jerry Brown, the former governor who slept on a mattress on the floor and drove around in a beat-up Chevy.

Senator John McCain has made some stunning inroads in the last week into what was considered safe Bush territory. Bill Jones, a statewide elected official and the highest-ranking Republican Party leader in the state, switched his endorsement from Mr Bush to Mr McCain. Then, on Thursday, popular San Diego Mayor Susan Golding, who had endorsed Mr Bush, announced she was switching to Mr McCain because she felt he had the best chance of beating Mr Gore in November.

Then came a further blow for Mr Bush. William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education under President Reagan, author of the best-seller Book of Virtues and arguably the most influential Republican Party thinker in the country, had this to say in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: "You can make the call right now that it is pretty clear that John McCain is a better bet for winning the presidency for the Republicans than George Bush."

As one of Mr McCain's campaign aides had said earlier this year of Mr Bush: "All the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to put invincibility together again."

Taking advantage of his momentum, Mr McCain appeared this week before huge and enthusiatic crowds in California and Washington state, which holds its primary on Tuesday. Some 3,000 people waited three hours in the rain to hear him speak in Puget Sound, Washington. On Thursday, some 1,800 students strained the capacity of a room at a college in Sacramento to hear the senator.

Mr McCain has said he will spend half of the next two weeks in California before the March 7th primary. Mr Bush, seemingly still undecided between his compassionate self and his right-wing self, has said he will spend only five days here.

It is a tough business, deciding where to focus a campaign, especially when a number of large states such as New York are holding their primaries the same day. But Mr McCain knows that a win in California - a huge state with a diverse population and political climate that mirrors much of the US - could sound the death knell for Mr Bush's campaign. By focusing his campaign here, Mr McCain is taking a calculated risk, the kind of risk that so far is producing one of the most compelling candidacies in recent US history.