Conservatives lose more faith in their president

In the White House Rose Garden yesterday, President George W. Bush was confronted with the sort of question that 10 months ago, upon his re-election, would have made people gulp in astonishment. "Are you still a conservative?" he was asked.

The president replied jauntily: "Proudly so." But, after five years of opinion polls showing that he has been the most divisive and partisan of presidents - garnering 15 per cent approval from Democrats, compared with more than 80 per cent from Republicans - the challenge is newly pertinent in Washington.

To some on the right, Mr Bush’s second term is revealing him not to be the true believer they expected.

Hurricane Katrina, and the huge federal response pledged by Mr Bush, had already alarmed some fiscal conservatives. The president, they worry, is instinctively a "big government" Republican.

"He wants to go to heaven without dying; a real conservative only spends what you have," says James Thurber, professor of government at American University. "He has overseen very large increases in expenditure with Medicare [the prescription drug benefit], the largest expansion in entitlement programmes since the 1960s."

But the nomination of Harriet Miers as Mr Bush’s second Supreme Court nominee has had far greater impact, triggering outrage among a different wing of the conservative coalition.

Richard Viguerie, chairman of American Target Advertising and the self- described "funding father of the conservative movement", said: "He started stronger than we thought, but as time has gone on he has begun to disappoint us more and more."

"Every Republican president has moved left since Eisenhower in their second term."

Mr Bush’s Supreme Court choice, he added pointedly, matched the apostasy of his father’s tax-raising. "He is his father’s son. George never was a movement conservative. He was always suspect, but he learned from his father’s mistakes.

"He developed an election strategy based on bribery. He put tariffs on steel. Florida was awash in federal spending in the run-up to the election."

The idea that Mr Bush’s conservatism was a campaign feint, designed to motivate the "base" and avoid the electoral consequences that felled his father’s re-election, is gaining some currency among some religious conservatives, who wonder whether they were hood-winked by his evangelical rhetoric.

"I have increasingly over time become dubious about Mr Bush’s desire to materially alter the impact of Roe v Wade", said one leading religious conservative. "He has offered good rhetoric about every child to be welcomed as an abstract principle, but he has never come out and said it should be reversed.

"He has played the social conservatives like a violin. It is a faux pas by social conservatives that they have aligned themselves with the party and a personality in a way that was unhelpful. They have accepted rhetoric in lieu of results. The movement has a measure of accountability."

The ambiguous conservatism of Ms Miers as Supreme Court nominee had come as a particular surprise to frontline activists after Mr Bush’s public stubbornness over his lower court nominees.

"Most conservatives expected and deserved more. The nomination is either a decision born of weakness, or political calculation or it’s the true nature of the president’ view of the court. It’s the rhetoric of Churchill and the actions of Chamberlain."

Yet it also underlines just how far campaign rhetoric can collide with the political realities of governing in a second term. While Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s chief of staff, had pledged in February that Mr Bush was "seizing the mantle of idealism", now he seems to be settling for political pragmatism.

One Republican strategist said: "This nomination on its face suggests a sense of timidity instead of boldness and courage."

John Podesta, director of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank, and former chief of staff to Bill Clinton, agreed. "He is thoroughly political, more so than his father and Ronald Reagan. His instincts are ideologically conservative and thoroughly political. His tenure as governor shows this is a guy who does what it takes. And the Republicans in the Senate didn’t want a big ideological fight and needed to try to appeal again to centrist voters. It does them no good to have a monumental fight."

Even so, it is Mr Bush who will be remembered if Ms Miers proves insufficiently conservative, not his Senate colleagues. "He is still better than Dole was and better than his father or Ford or Nixon," Mr Viguerie concedes, but warns: "If he continues down the path he is on, he will have a failed presidency. Foreign policy is up in the air, and domestically he will be another failed Republican president."

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