"This will defund significantly some of the trial lawyer community, and it rewards the business community, the Fortune 500 guys who have been increasingly supportive of the broad center-right coalition," he said.
Of specific provisions protecting gun manufacturers from class-action lawsuits, Norquist added, "This will strengthen the Second Amendment community, especially the NRA." He was referring to the National Rifle Association, a core GOP constituency.
The Bush administration has also challenged predominantly Democratic organized labor, especially public employee unions, on a host of fronts. The most recent was a major revision of civil service rules at the Department of Homeland Security that the administration would like to expand to the entire government over the next few years. The National Labor Relations Board has helped make it harder for unions to represent temporary workers, among several rule changes pushed by GOP appointees.
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman rejected the notion that Bush's domestic agenda is driven by calculations about interest-group rewards and penalties. But he endorsed the idea that the agenda Bush will lay out in his nationally televised speech to Congress on Wednesday night has implications for the long-term balance of power between the parties.
He hopes that individual accounts under Social Security would produce a generation of voters less reliant on government as distributor of benefits, and more ready to identify with the Republican Party as the protector of their interests.
"Most people who are investors tend to vote Republican," said Mehlman, manager of Bush's reelection campaign. "This creates conditions under which voters are more likely to support politicians who are pro-growth, pro-ownership, pro-free market."
The expansive nature of the Bush agenda, said George C. Edwards III, a prominent presidential scholar at Texas A&M University, reflects how "this is a very strategic administration," which tries to use policies to advance its long-term party-building goals. "I think Karl Rove views this as his great legacy."
The danger for Bush is that there may be less support than he imagines for major changes of the sort represented by proposals for Social Security and plans to limit civil damages, some experts say.
"These are not incremental policies," Edwards noted. "They have a greater risk of failure."
Jacobson agreed, especially on the question of Social Security. "I'm not so sure that a program designed to increase the exposure of ordinary Americans to market forces in ever-broader aspects of life is politically sustainable in the long run -- wait till the next recession."
Thus, the hope of Democrats is that Bush's move to lay claim to the issue of retirement security will in the end only buttress the Democratic advantage on this issue.
In the meantime, the financial contributions of various groups make plain they have decided where their interests lie in the coming debates over domestic policy.
Continuing a trend, lawyers gave Democrats $107.3 million in 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and $39 million to Republicans. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America gave a total of $2.4 million, and 92 percent went to Democrats. Baron and Budd, a trial lawyer firm based in Dallas, gave 98 percent its $1.1 million in contributions to Democrats.
Public sector unions, which are most threatened by Bush administration labor initiatives, gave a total of $13.1 million in campaign contributions in 2004, of which $10.8 million went to Democrats.
The finance and investment banking community, which stands to benefit from the creation of private savings accounts financed through Social Security, provided overwhelming support to the Bush-Cheney campaign. The top 10 employers of Bush donors all are part of this sector, including Morgan Stanley, $604,480; Merrill Lynch, $580,004; and UBS Americas, $459,075.
"The dividend tax cut, expanding IRAs and private Social Security accounts are all examples of President Bush and Karl Rove understanding that the more people we can lure into the 'investor class' with private pools of private capital, the better it is for Republicans and Republican issues," Moore said.
