GOP Irritation At Bush Was Long Brewing

One reason some lawmakers said Bush should shift gears quickly is the changed power structure in the House. For the first five years of the administration, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) used a top-down management style to push the Bush agenda through. With Bush at the top of the ticket and very popular with the GOP base, most lawmakers fell in line.

The election of Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to replace DeLay as party leader has created a more unpredictable and freewheeling Republican caucus. Boehner won by promising to return power to chairmen and rank-and-file legislators who tend to be less compromising -- and less concerned about accommodating the White House.

The blowup over the Dubai deal illustrated the new environment. Bush infuriated members by threatening to veto any congressional effort to prevent an Arab company from taking control of terminals at six U.S. seaports. Instead of falling in line, they felled the deal by joining with Democrats for a 62 to 2 committee vote against Bush. It was the breaking point for many members. Afterward, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) was quoted in The Washington Post as saying, "This is probably the worst administration ever in getting Congress's opinion on anything."

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) is a prime example of such perceived slights. He was handpicked by the White House to challenge then-Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in 2004. Thune entered the race under heavy White House pressure and won in part by promising to protect South Dakota's Ellsworth Air Force Base from being closed.

But when the Pentagon targeted Ellsworth for closing, Thune's complaints to White House senior officials were coldly dismissed, according to people familiar with the conversations. "Why are you whining?" was how one person familiar with the session paraphrased the White House response.

Thune declined to comment on the base closing but said, "I think Republicans want to be helpful, but the administration needs to help us to help them."

The tipping point for many lawmakers was last year's debate over the Bush plan to restructure Social Security by offering personal savings accounts. For years, House Republicans had sent word to Karl Rove, Bush's top strategist, and others that any efforts to dismantle the Social Security system could prove disastrous to them. Regardless of the merits, the legislators would say, older Americans vote in high percentages in congressional races and would likely punish the party if it tinkered with the popular program.

House Republicans in particular were already panicking about the Medicare prescription drug benefit they had passed more than a year earlier. The program was seen as too costly for conservatives and too confusing for seniors. Yet a majority of Republicans voted for it under intense lobbying from Bush and GOP congressional leaders, and several regretted it.

"Bottom line, there is a lot of buyer's remorse," said Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.). If the vote were held today on the Medicare prescription drug benefit, he said, as many 120 Republicans would vote against it. "It was probably our greatest failure in my adult lifetime," he said.

So when Bush sprang the Social Security plan on them, many Republicans balked. Eventually, congressional Republicans revolted and killed what Bush had trumpeted as the top domestic priority of his second term. Another common complaint about the White House is that it asked lawmakers to take politically risky votes and did not bother to provide cover when Democrats started attacking.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a Bush ally who dismissed concerns about an inattentive White House, said he regrets voting for the No Child Left Behind bill in the first term.