Republican Blame Game

By John Greenwald

EVEN AS PRESIDENT BUSH FOUGHT FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE last week, the G.O.P. was dissolving into fratricidal strife. In conversations with reporters aboard Bush's campaign train, moderate Republicans and White House aides fingered conservatives PATRICK BUCHANAN, Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett for causing the President's political problems. Outraged conservatives struck back the same day. "All three men are crisscrossing the country attempting to save the Bush & campaign . . . whose spokesmen are attacking them," right-wing activist Brent Bozell complained in a letter to White House chief of staff James Baker. But even before the blame game started, Bozell and fellow activists had privately invited top conservatives to meet late this week to plot the movement's recovery from a Bush defeat.