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

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."