Two of a Kind?

It took the Democrats all of about a minute and a half to turn President Bush's endorsement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) last week into an attack ad. The Democratic National Committee posted a 49-second online video that shows Bush playfully tap-dancing for reporters as he waited for McCain to arrive at the White House, then flashes some pointed captions:

"Why Is This Man So Happy?"

"Because he found someone to promise a Third Bush Term."

The ad then splices together similar-sounding comments from Bush and McCain on Iraq, Social Security and tax cuts, concluding with a clip of Bush mangling the aphorism "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

Expect a lot of the "third Bush term" theme over the next eight months, as Democrats make his 2000 campaign rival into his fraternal twin. The McCain camp recognizes the problem of being associated too closely with a president whose approval ratings are in the low 30s. But at the moment, the presumptive Republican nominee needs to rally a skeptical conservative base behind him, and Bush can help.

In the weeks since McCain effectively sealed the Republican presidential nomination, a fiery debate has ensued on the Internet and elsewhere about whether he and Bush really offer the same prescription for the country. For now, Bush and McCain find themselves on the same side of that debate as their fiercest liberal opponents, albeit from different perspectives. Just as activists on the left find it advantageous to link Bush and McCain, so for the moment do they.

White House press secretary Dana Perino denied last week that Bush and McCain had been longtime rivals. "Absolutely not," she said on Fox News.

"And while I think that might be a good story line for some people to say, to try, it's simply not true. And I would say that hasn't been true ever, but certainly after they were competitors, then, in 2000 and 2004, Senator McCain went on to work his tail off to help this president."

The record, of course, is more complex. The two fought bitterly for the Republican nomination in 2000, essentially ending in a nasty showdown in South Carolina that poisoned their relations for quite a while. After Bush took office, McCain forced through a campaign-finance overhaul over the president's reservations. Bush signed the bill but did not invite McCain to the White House for a signing ceremony.

Over the succeeding years, it often seemed as if they fought each other as much as they fought Democrats. McCain opposed Bush's signature tax cuts, cut a deal with Democrats on judicial nominations, criticized the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, slammed the management of the Iraq war and condemned the use of certain interrogation techniques against terrorism detainees.

Yet, at the same time, McCain has also been a strong Bush ally, most especially in the battle to liberalize immigration laws and to create a path to citizenship for people living illegally in the United States. He has reversed himself on the tax cuts, saying they should be made permanent; he has become the biggest supporter of Bush's troop buildup in Iraq; and he sided with the president against a bill -- vetoed this weekend -- that would have banned waterboarding by the CIA. Congressional Quarterly reports that McCain supported Bush 90 percent of the time in five of the first six years of his presidency.

The open question is which side of this equation McCain chooses to emphasize come fall, when he is reaching out to moderates and independents. And whether Bush will still be dancing.