Just the other day, a distinguished Washington columnist for
          The New York Times assured his readers that his own paper’s
          June 21 front-page opinion survey—which tracked declining public
          confidence in George W. Bush—was meaningless. It doesn’t matter,
          the columnist suggested, that people are distressed by the
          President’s pandering to the wealthy, or that his views on
          energy and the environment are generating widespread distrust,
          or that on virtually every issue now pending in Congress, an
          overwhelming majority disagrees with Mr. Bush.

          None of this matters, according to the Op-Ed sage, because no
          strong Democratic opponent to Mr. Bush has yet emerged for
          the next Presidential election. Presumably, the columnist has privately
          urged his publisher to erase all those wasteful national-polling expenses
          from the great newspaper’s budget between now and 2004.

          As an example of Republican spin, that column wasn’t particularly adept. Its
          argument certainly doesn’t seem to have convinced many Republican politicians,
          who are currently more preoccupied by next year’s midterm elections than by the
          absence of a Democratic challenger to the President. Unlike an Op-Ed columnist
          who enjoys a permanent sinecure, they know that the President’s plummeting
          approval numbers might cost them their jobs.

          They must have noticed that the favorable rating for their party has declined just as
          rapidly as the President’s.

          Only five months ago, right-wing Republicans were issuing proclamations that hailed
          their control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Why should they
          care if the election had actually revealed a center-left majority among voters and left
          Congress almost perfectly divided? A new era of conservative governance had
          arrived. Their enemies would be driven before them, and they would remake
          America as envisioned by Tom DeLay.

          Now the triumphal pronouncements have been replaced by nervous whispering, at
          least in part because of those troubling poll results reported by The Times and other
          news organizations. Republicans in Congress and elsewhere are rediscovering what
          ought to have been obvious for some time: In a country where doctrinaire right-wingers
          are a minority, the radical agenda concealed behind Mr. Bush’s  “compassionate conservatism”
          is a political liability. Having achieved their unfair tax cut, which hardly satisfied their appetite,
          they have fallen to squabbling among themselves.

          Conservatives complain that the President has too quickly abandoned party
          positions on such issues as education vouchers and electricity price caps. Moderates
          fret that he has held fast to unpopular plans such as drilling for oil in Florida’s
          coastal waters and the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (although there are signs
          that the White House is preparing to drop those schemes, too). Even the dogmatic
          party leadership in the House is beginning to distance itself from Mr. Bush.

          Beholden as they are to the insurance and medical industries that finance their
          campaigns, the House Republicans are warning the White House that they will not
          support Mr. Bush’s threatened veto of legislation creating a real patients’ bill of
          rights. The leading Republican voice on that issue, Representative Charlie Norwood,
          has publicly denounced Mr. Bush’s advisers for their crude manipulation of him and
          endorsed a Democratic version of the bill. Speaker Dennis Hastert abruptly rejected
          the veto threat with a “compromise” that permits aggrieved patients to sue insurers
          in state courts.

          Mr. Bush’s enthusiasm for privatizing Social Security is also making Republican
          officeholders jittery. Representative Tom Davis, chairman of the National
          Republican Campaign Committee, has bluntly informed White House political boss
          Karl Rove that he hopes this foolhardy project won’t be pursued before November
          2002. In Mr. Davis’ home state of Virginia, a white Republican candidate just
          barely won an off-year election against a weaker black Democrat who campaigned
          against privatization.

          More broadly, the bitter gubernatorial primary in New Jersey and the rumblings of
          dissent that followed the defection of Senator Jim Jeffords are signs that the G.O.P.
          is becoming a narrow and regionalized party, excessively dependent on its Southern
          base and its corporate financiers. Any hope that Mr. Bush would reform his party,
          mute the extremists and move toward the mainstream is diminishing. He lacks the
          stature and the intellectual depth to accomplish that demanding task.

          None of this necessarily means that Mr. Bush is headed toward inevitable defeat,
          nor does Republican disarray compensate for Democratic timidity. The Op-Ed sage
          was correct, if unoriginal, in observing that you can’t beat somebody with nobody.
          He might have added that you can’t defeat bad ideas with no ideas.

          But polls indicating the President’s weakness do indeed matter.
          To Republicans, they offer a warning about their continuing estrangement from the public.
          To Democrats, they provide an encouragement to be bold rather than “bipartisan.”
          To citizens, they prove that disgust with the country’s direction is not nutty, but normal.

          And with all due respect to that Op-Ed guy, Mr. Bush and his advisers pay very close
          attention to all those opinion surveys. That’s why they’re taking their own polls—and
          worrying about the results.

          You may reach Joe Conason via email at: jconason@observer.com