The Breakaway Republicans

By KAREN TUMULTY

The closest thing to a working political antenna at the White House these days may be the one on Dan Bartlett's car radio. Congressional anger over President George W. Bush's decision to allow a Dubai-owned company to operate terminals at major U.S. ports had been at a low boil for days before the White House got its first inkling of the furor: Bartlett, the presidential counselor, happened to tune in to conservative talk-show host Michael Savage on the way home from work. By the time the President moved to quash it several days later with assurances that he wouldn't have allowed the deal "if there was any chance that this transaction would jeopardize the security of the United States," it was far too late to quell the Republican rebellion. "This freight train had already left the station," says a Bush aide. And the President's threat to use his first-ever veto was no obstacle to its momentum.

If there is any message that Bush should take forward after the blistering he got last week from virtually the entire Republican Party, it is that "Trust me" is no longer a viable political strategy. That's because nervous Republicans don't--at least not when their futures are at stake. With Bush's bungling of the ports controversy, they are starting to say privately that they cannot afford to risk their fate on the agenda and instincts of an unpopular President who never has to face the voters again. What began months ago as a routine government-approval process for a business deal--in this case, one made politically radioactive by the fact that it would allow an Arab-government-owned company to manage terminals at major U.S. ports--has exploded into the sharpest and most bitter confrontation that Bush has had with his party. And it has hastened the declaration of independence toward which Republicans have been edging for months. "This is the tipping point," said a House leadership strategist. "No longer will Republicans sit idle when they have a difference with the President." A senior Senate aide spoke even more bluntly: "It's every man for himself."

But let's pause for a moment, if only to note that although security experts say there are plenty of reasons to be worried about the vulnerability of the nation's ports, the nationality of the companies that operate the terminals is not one of them. Only about 5% of the millions of containers that flow through the nation's ports are inspected, and there still are no standards for container locks and seals or for port-worker identification cards. The country has spent $18 billion on making airports more secure since Sept. 11, but it has invested only $630 million to safeguard the nation's ports, even though a study last year by the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard found that almost 70 of the 361 U.S. ports are vulnerable to terrorism.

While none of that is particularly comforting, it does make the outrage directed at Dubai Ports World, which has operated 23 facilities on five continents without a mote of protest, seem a bit unfair. And it raises the question of how the Administration is supposed to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world if it presumes that all businesses there are natural enemies. The President went so far as to ask, "those who are questioning [the deal] to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard."

There is also a legitimate strategic concern about alienating the United Arab Emirates (Dubai is one of the seven emirates), given that it has been a recent but important convert to the Administration's campaign against terrorism. "Totally in bed" is how a senior intelligence official characterized the U.A.E.'s relationship with the U.S.; Senator John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, says, "The U.A.E. is a vital, I repeat, a vital ally."

Whatever the merits of the President's decision to allow the port deal to go through, what rattled Republicans most was that Bush and his entire team seemed oblivious to the political problems it created. How could Bush have failed to foresee the potential public relations consequences of an agreement to hand over terminals to a company owned by a country that had been home to two of the 9/11 hijackers, both of whom laundered their money in its banks? A distraught Republican summed up the party's problem: the episode was "caviar for Democrats." And it was a role reversal that must have been most satisfying for them too, since it put Bush in the position of arguing nuances of international diplomacy that got lost in the alarmist din over security.

There was visible relief at the White House when, after Bush's top strategist, Karl Rove, dropped some hints to Fox Radio's Tony Snow that Bush might look favorably on a slowdown of the deal, Dubai Ports World announced it would delay taking over the port operations. That announcement gave the Administration, should it need one, a face-saving way to send the deal back to an interagency group for a 45-day review, buying more time to sell it to Congress. Said White House press secretary Scott McClellan: "We believe that once Congress has a better understanding of the facts and the safeguards that are in place, they will be more comfortable with the transaction's moving forward."

Perhaps, but it wasn't just the unthinkable possibility of appearing weak on national security next to Hillary Clinton and Edward Kennedy that drove Hill Republicans to take on the President. It was a feeling that he was treating them with contempt. Even as McClellan spoke about appeasement, there was grumbling that the White House still hadn't contacted Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert directly to talk matters through, and a House leadership aide noted that "with the veto threat and then the accusation that members were being xenophobic, [the President] alienated them even more."

Beyond feelings of personal insult, a look at the electoral map offers another compelling reason some members might seize an opportunity to put distance between themselves and Bush. Nine of the 10 most endangered House incumbents this fall are Republicans, noted nonpartisan political analyst Stuart Rothenberg in a recent column for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. Bush remains a big draw for the hard-core Republican faithful, but it was hard not to notice the absence of Ohio Senator Mike DeWine when the President arrived at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport last week to raise $1.1 million for DeWine at a private event in the tony Cincinnati suburb of Indian Hill. (DeWine's probable Senate opponent observed that "DeWine doesn't want to be seen with President Bush in public.") One of the first to denounce the ports deal was Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum, a Senator whose re-election battle--already the toughest in the country--will be even harder to win without improved support in Philadelphia, one of the affected ports. Close behind Santorum was Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who is struggling to establish his identity for a possible 2008 presidential run.

The Republican Congress has been tiptoeing toward this moment for months, becoming less reluctant to challenge Bush as his approval rating stays mired in the low 40s. G.O.P. lawmakers are getting more vocal in challenging Bush's spending priorities, and his modest budget cuts on programs from farm aid to housing to student loans are running into election-year resistance, even as the legislators complain about the costs of his Medicare prescription-drug program. On Friday the coalition of House conservatives known as the Republican Study Committee sent a letter to the White House demanding more justification for Bush's spending requests, specifically the $92.2 billion in emergency money that he wants for the war on terrorism and Gulf Coast rebuilding, "so that we can intelligently exercise our constitutional right to appropriate funds."

And things could get a lot worse, even on the national-security issues that have been Bush's greatest political strength. Already DeWine, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is planning legislation to give Congress more say over the National Security Agency's domestic-spying program, despite Bush's assertions that any hearings or legislation would help terrorists. And the President was forced to accept congressionally mandated restrictions on the tactics that interrogators may use with terrorist suspects. Republicans, their faith shaken in his ability to protect them politically, may even feel emboldened enough to press for a sharper drawdown of troops from Iraq before the November elections. On the domestic front, conservatives are likely to stiffen their resistance to the guest-worker provisions in Bush's immigration plan and, with their constituents feeling the effects of a record trade deficit, could have less patience for Bush's nonconfrontational stance toward China.

White House officials, recognizing the likelihood that Republicans on Capitol Hill will go their own way, say they have designed an agenda that relies on Congress for very little in this election year. Instead, they say, the President will deploy his bully pulpit for such issues as overhauling the entitlement programs--Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid--that eat up half the budget and could balloon as baby boomers retire. By judiciously asserting his influence, Bush believes he can set "an agenda that our party and, one would hope, the country can unite behind," White House communications director Nicolle Wallace said. But the flap over port security, coming after the controversy over Vice President Dick Cheney's handling of his accidental shooting of a hunting companion, shows that the White House will have to sharpen its game to regain even that much ground. An Administration official said Bush's aides realize that they'll be taking more Republican shots "every year that we're closer to being done." But in the end, the wounds that hurt the most may be the ones that are self-inflicted.

With reporting by Mike Allen, Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Mark Thompson/Washington