By Holly Bailey

It was no secret that John McCain believed he would lock up the nomination Tuesday night. When the media arrived Tuesday afternoon at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, where McCain held his victory rally, staffers had just raised a sign near the stage that read “1,191”--the magic number that McCain needed to reach.

Now comes the tough part. It’s an open secret that the McCain campaign hopes the fight on the Democratic nomination will continue a bit longer, to allow the Arizona senator to get a head start on the general election campaign. McCain and his wife Cindy are scheduled to lunch with President Bush at the White House tomorrow. Bush’s endorsement will give McCain access to voter databases and staffers at the Republican National Committee-both priceless attributes for a campaign that hasn’t even come close to putting up the kind of fund-raising numbers posted by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The big question is how McCain’s style will evolve as a general election candidate. The senator has bluntly admitted that he doesn’t particularly enjoy fund-raising (perhaps one of the reasons he’s been pressing Obama to take up an earlier pledge to accept public funding for the fall race). He’s also pressed his staff to schedule more town halls versus the kind of rah-rah campaign rallies you typically see in the fall-a strategy of mixing it up with the voters that has gone mostly untested in the last few presidential campaigns. But that’s the sort of conflict that McCain feeds on. Asked what if anything might change about McCain as a candidate, Mark Salter, the senator’s longest and closest advisor, shrugged. “I can tell you one thing, he’ll never run as a frontrunner,” Salter said. “He’ll run as the underdog. That’s his style.”