GOP Growing Increasingly Angry, Frightened by Bush's Missteps

By Steven Thomma and James Kuhnhenn
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Thursday 02 March 2006

Washington - President Bush, once the seemingly invincible vanguard of a new Republican majority, could be endangering his party's hold on power as the GOP heads into this year's midterm congressional elections.

A series of political missteps has raised questions about the Bush administration's candor, competence and credibility and left the White House off-balance, off-message and unable to command either the nation's policy agenda or its politics the way the president did during his first term.

This week, newly released video of Bush listening passively to warnings about the dire threat posed by Hurricane Katrina and a report that intelligence analysts warned for more than two years that the insurgency in Iraq could swell into a civil war provided fresh fodder for charges that the president ignores unwelcome alarms.

His attacks on those who questioned his administration's approval of a seaports deal with the United Arab Emirates and his ill-fated nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court have angered some conservatives and Republican members of Congress.

And even some Bush supporters remain anxious about the economy, the federal deficit, the war in Iraq and the extent of the administration's warrantless wiretapping.

"The White House has been taking it on the chin lately, and the reverberations are being felt throughout the GOP," Republican blogger Bobby Eberle wrote this week. "From the Harriet Miers nomination to the Dubai Ports and more, the folks in charge of message strategy appear to be asleep at the wheel."

Said Republican pollster Ed Goeas: "If this environment holds, you have to assume it's going to tip for the Democrats."

That's not to say that second-term blues are unique to Bush, the environment will hold or that Republicans will lose control of the House of Representatives or the Senate in November. Polls show that Republicans still have the edge on the crucial question of which party is more trusted to defend the country against terrorists, for example.

But eight months before the election, Democrats are growing bolder, and many Republicans are getting nervous about the president's stewardship and his ability to regain the upper hand.

Bush's approval ratings remain stuck in the mid- to low 40s in two polls released Thursday. The two contradict a CBS poll earlier this week, which Knight Ridder reported, that showed it plunging to 34 percent in recent weeks.

Growing doubts about the administration's case for and conduct of the war in Iraq have kept the president from reversing his slide, and now his administration's missteps are making it even harder for him to regain his footing.

When conservatives challenged the ports deal, for example, Bush threatened to veto any legislation blocking it, then all but accused his critics of racism for opposing an Arab company.

"I've been helpful out here on the campaign trail, backing the president on eavesdropping, defending them on Iraq and Social Security, and then you have this thrown on your lap without any consideration," said Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla. "Then the threat of a veto, that really took my breath away."

"I didn't think his choice of words there was really good," said Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. "And I thought his veto threat was untimely and inappropriate."

"It certainly is the perfect storm of aggravating or provoking congressional egos and the president getting his back up and saying the least diplomatic thing he could have said," said Michael Franc, a former Republican aide in Congress who's now a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center in Washington.

Moreover, Bush's remarks reminded conservatives of the fact that the White House accused them of sexism when they challenged the Miers nomination. They didn't like that, either.

The president still has Republican support. The Battleground Poll found that 86 percent of Republicans approve of the way he's doing his job. It found that he's still supported by voters in the South, Central Plains and Mountain West, by men, married voters with children, conservatives and white conservative Christians. (The poll was conducted by Goeas and Democrat Celinda Lake.)

Yet Republican enthusiasm has waned, a potentially troubling trend that could hamper GOP turnout this fall.

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg found that the ranks of Republicans who say they strongly approve of Bush's job performance had dropped by 15 percentage points. Similarly, strong approval from conservatives dropped by 14 points, and approval from white married men dropped by 14 points.

"Our analysis," Greenberg said, "shows a sharp slippage among white rural voters and blue-collar men as well as the best educated and upscale married men, even before the last controversies around port security and the Iraq 'civil war.'"

For more on the Battleground Poll, go to GWNewsCenter.org.