Bush-driven GOP politics

WASHINGTON — The turmoil in the Republican presidential contest, which seems to produce a new front-runner every week, owes to President Bush's unpopularity and the fact that even members of his own party want to turn the page on the past seven years.

John McCain's victory in the New Hampshire primary, which vaulted him to the lead nationally, was built in large part on anti-Bush votes.

Republican Mitt Romney won on Tuesday in Michigan by edging away from a strategy based on pure conservative orthodoxy. Instead, he presented himself as the true candidate of change.

"If ever there's been a time we needed change in Washington, it's now," Romney has been saying. He tries to minimize the fact that the capital whose habits he deplores has been dominated by George W. Bush. Yet the "Change Begins with Us" placards held aloft at recent Romney campaign rallies bear a striking resemblance to those "Change We Can Believe In" posters that appear at Barack Obama's rallies.

And Mike Huckabee has emerged as a major Republican contender by being as different as possible from Bush. Huckabee has even attacked the "arrogant bunker mentality" of the administration's foreign policy.

That McCain's re-emergence arose more from opposition to Bush than from the Arizona senator's embrace of the troop surge in Iraq was made clear by the New Hampshire primary exit polls. Among McCain's voters, 54 percent had a negative view of the Bush administration (compared with 41 percent of Romney's voters), and an astonishing 42 percent of McCain's voters disapproved of the Iraq war, compared with just 22 percent of Romney's supporters.

These figures may seem surprising. McCain has been a consistent supporter of the war and said recently that he could imagine keeping American troops in Iraq for 100 years. Yet McCain's maverick image and the fact that he regularly emphasizes the aspects of Bush's Iraq policy that he opposed established him as his party's closest thing to an anti-Bush candidate.

This helps explain why McCain did far better among self-described moderates and liberals in New Hampshire than among conservatives.

Before the turn of the year, the Republican contest did not have an ideological character, and the party's candidates were reluctant to distance themselves from Bush on the theory that many in the party remained loyal to the president.

For now, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Sen. Fred Thompson seem the least inclined to back away from the Bush record. Both have been losing ground nationally, though Thompson still hopes to do well on Jan. 19 in South Carolina, a state that saved Bush's presidential candidacy eight years ago.

But with the president's standing in the polls remaining low and the public's intense desire for change spilling across party lines, Bush may find himself on the sidelines, watching a campaign built around a bipartisan repudiation of his legacy.

McCain will have to tread carefully, maintaining his image of independence to hold his moderate base while reaching out to conservatives in states where middle-of-the-road voters play a modest role in Republican primaries. His Michigan loss suggested this act will not be easy.

Romney revived his candidacy in Michigan by shifting from an image of himself as the new embodiment of Ronald Reagan to a nostalgic appeal to the memory of his late father, George Romney, a liberal who would be out of step with today's GOP.

Huckabee hopes he will draw enough support from evangelical Christians to win in South Carolina, while Giuliani is betting everything on a strong showing at the end of the month in Florida.

In a Republican Party more unsettled and disheartened than at any point in the modern era, it is almost certain that the contest will take another unexpected turn. Tony Fabrizio, an experienced Republican pollster, suggested in an interview just how peculiar the year could get.

Should the ultra-maverick Huckabee emerge as the main alternative to McCain, Republican leaders might have to rally, reluctantly, to a man so many of them had resisted.

"Only Mike Huckabee could turn John McCain into the establishment candidate," Fabrizio said. And only George W. Bush could turn Romney, the investment banker and conservative loyalist, into a rhetorical enemy of the powers-that-be.

This is the politics the Bush presidency has wrought.

E.J. Dionne's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is postchat@aol.com