In election year, GOP wary of following Bush

Some still stick by president
And many Republicans are still rallying around the president. After signing the Patriot Act, Bush flew to Atlanta last night to headline the Georgia Republican Party's Presidents' Day dinner. A senior White House official, speaking not for attribution in order to discuss political strategy, expressed relief that on the biggest policy issues -- Iraq above all -- most congressional Republicans still back Bush.

But many Republicans are less willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt as they once did. That became evident last year on domestic issues, when they abandoned his Social Security plan, criticized his handling of Hurricane Katrina and forced the withdrawal of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. Just yesterday, the Senate Budget Committee passed a budget resolution that dropped Bush's proposals for tax relief, Medicare cuts and expanded health savings accounts. A frustrated Bush pushed back earlier in the week, accusing Congress of shortchanging Katrina relief efforts.

Now the estrangement increasingly appears even on national security issues, where Republicans long deferred to the president. Recent rebukes run from the ports deal to a ban on torture to Patriot Act revisions forced on Bush in exchange for congressional approval. Partly in the name of national security, Republican leaders also seem poised to dismiss Bush's proposal for a guest-worker program for illegal immigrants.

"He cannot afford another breach related to national security, I can tell you that," said Patrick Griffin, who was the chief congressional liaison for the Clinton White House. "That would be devastating."

Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who produced a survey this week suggesting Bush's public standing has been hurt by the port issue, said it may be too late to repair the schism between Bush and congressional Republicans. "I don't know how you put the genie back in the bottle," he said. "After five years of unwavering loyalty to the president, they've demonstrated they'll break with the president to save their own skins."

The port deal has provided ammunition to Democrats who have begun making the case more broadly that Bush is in over his head. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) yesterday called the port situation a "case study in the administration's incompetence," and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) said the administration "was clearly asleep at the switch" and "bungled the oversight of this deal."

But it's not clear whether Democrats will be able to turn that issue to their benefit in the fall. Republicans on Capitol Hill were every bit as vocal as their opponents in standing against the port deal, making it harder to draw a clear distinction come campaign time. By turning against Bush, some GOP strategists believe Republican leaders may have saved themselves a worse fate.

"I never thought we would see a day when anybody would get to the president's right on national security," Fabrizio said. "They may have made chicken salad out of chicken you-know-what. If the Democrats had been able to use this, it would have been horrible, horrible."

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