Like father, like son: Similar woes for both Bushes

WASHINGTON — Throughout his first term, President Bush struggled to avoid repeating his father's mistakes. Yet less than a year after he claimed the re-election mandate denied his dad, he is confronting some of the same problems that bedeviled the first Bush presidency.

Like father, like son:

• Conservatives are rebelling.

• His poll numbers are in the basement.

• Economic unrest is growing.

• Top White House staffers are under fire.

"George W. Bush always wanted to be like Ronald Reagan, rather than like his father," said presidential historian Thomas Cronin of Colorado College.

But it was an aspiration that may have set him up for failure.

"Both Bushes were held to a real and imagined Reagan bar. And when his father broke his promise on 'no new taxes,' he got hit really hard by the right," Cronin said.

Likewise, when the younger Bush nominated Harriet Miers, his former personal lawyer, to the Supreme Court, bypassing experienced jurists with proven conservative credentials, many prominent conservatives balked. He promised them another conservative like Justice Antonin Scalia, but he gave them a mystery. Politicians of all stripes hate uncertainty.

Congressional misgivings over Miers and the CIA leak investigation involving White House advisers have cast a cloud over the administration. Soaring gas prices, hurricane reconstruction costs, the war in Iraq and declining consumer confidence have darkened the economic outlook.

Avoiding his father's path was a first-term mantra for the younger Bush.

Where the father distanced himself from religious conservatives, the son aggressively courted them.

The first Bush built an international coalition and ended the first Gulf War after driving Iraq from Kuwait. The younger Bush ignored international opposition and toppled Saddam Hussein's government.

The father was criticized for lacking an economic program other than "message: I care." The son promised big tax cuts and muscled them through Congress. No one called him a wimp.

But the younger Bush made several miscalculations, some of his Republican critics suggest.