Support low, Bush isolated by GOP

WASHINGTON -- President Bush is entering a critical point in his presidency as an increasingly isolated figure within the Republican Party: He has suffered some high-profile defections from his inner circle, presidential candidates are rushing to distance themselves from his administration, and rank-and-file Republicans are expressing growing disillusionment with the scandals and mismanagement that have rocked the White House.

With 20 months left in office -- and his approval ratings mired below 40 percent -- some of the president's former advisers are seeking to salvage their reputations by going public with their grievances. George J. Tenet, Bush's former CIA director, is the latest Bush loyalist to turn on the president, claiming in a book to be published Monday that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney rushed to war in Iraq without having a "serious debate" over whether the country posed an immediate threat to the United States.

The book comes just weeks after one of the president's former top strategists, Matthew Dowd, broke publicly with Bush, in an expansive interview with The New York Times in which he portrayed the president as "secluded and bubbled in" and criticized him for refusing to work with Democrats and continuing to support the Iraq war.

At the same time, the GOP is nervously eyeing a 2008 race that many in the party fear will be a referendum on a widely unpopular presidency.

"The looming election has started to put the fear of God in the Republican Party," said Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University. "George Bush has severely damaged the Republican Party in the short run, and probably the intermediate term as well."

On the campaign trail, Republican candidates are barely mentioning the president, or are doing so only to criticize the Bush administration.

In his formal campaign announcement this week in New Hampshire, Senator John McCain of Arizona blasted the management of the Iraq war and the response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and called the federal government "bloated, irresponsible, and incompetent."

Patrick Toomey, president of the conservative group Club for Growth and a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, said, "It's a simple and pragmatic calculation: The president's numbers are very low. No candidate wants to be associated with the policies of a president who is this unpopular. If we start to have some terrific news in Iraq, it will all change."

As Bush battles the Democratic Congress over the Iraq war and a continuing scandal over the mass firing of US attorneys, he can no longer count on unwavering support from Republicans in the House and Senate. GOP stalwarts have joined Democrats in calling for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign, in an indication of the political peril Republicans see in aligning themselves with the president.

While polls have shown GOP voters are still largely behind Bush on the biggest issue of the day -- the Iraq war -- his base of support is showing signs of splintering. A Pew Research Center survey issued Thursday found that 54 percent of Republicans and voters who lean Republican want a presidential candidate who will take a different approach to the war in Iraq.

"It's a reaction to the reality of the news out of Iraq," said Scott Keeter, the Pew center's director of survey research.

"It signals a lack of solidity in Republican support. In terms of what should be done next, you don't have a consensus among Republicans," Keeter said.

The loss of support among Republicans is particularly striking because the Bush White House was spared most internal party dissent until the last few months. The president has run a famously leak-proof administration, and has almost always succeeded in getting Republicans in Congress to follow his lead.

Some Republicans argue that the recent defections are isolated cases that are not indicative of larger problems inside the White House or the Republican Party. Dowd was a former Democrat who switched party allegiances to support Bush because he saw him as a consensus-builder; Tenet's decision to write a tell-all book appears to be motivated in part by the administration's efforts to blame him for the faulty intelligence that was used to justify the Iraq invasion.

"This is a matter of people settling scores and getting their own perception of controversial decision-making on the record," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. "It's not uncommon in the final two years of a presidential administration."

Yesterday, the White House pushed back at Tenet's assertion that the president and vice president didn't carefully consider the threat posed by Iraq. White House counselor Dan Bartlett said Tenet was not privy to all the meetings Bush was involved in during the run-up to the war.

"The president did weigh the various proposals, the various consequences," Bartlett said on NBC's "Today."

"That was a strategic decision the president did make, and he made it very carefully. So I would take issue with that," Bartlett said.

Asked about polls that show the public strongly opposed to the president's Iraq policies, the White House has not betrayed concern.

"The president is the commander in chief. He stands on principle," spokeswoman Dana Perino said Thursday.