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Besieged by political rows and sagging poll ratings, US President George W. Bush received a fresh blow Sunday as a former top aide who helped him get elected publicly criticized his leadership.
Matthew Dowd, a key advisor to Bush in two election victories, became the first member of the president's inner circle to publicly break ranks, voicing disappointment over his strategy in Iraq in a New York Times interview.
His comments came amid mounting pressure on Bush as Democrats maintained efforts to pull out US forces from the war, and accusations of wrongdoing by Bush's top justice official, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in the firing of federal prosecutors.
Dowd accused Bush of ignoring the will of the American people on Iraq, the newspaper reported. He said Bush's Democratic rival for the presidency in 2004, John Kerry, was right to call for US withdrawal from the country.
Bush's camp reiterated his refusal to bow to the Democrats' bid to pull out the troops. One of his senior advisers, Dan Bartlett, branded it a political maneuver that would leave Americans open to attack.
“A precipitous withdrawal, if we were to step back now … would weaken the United States' interests in the region and in the world. It would make us more vulnerable to attack,” Bartlett said Sunday on ABC News.
Lawmakers last week passed a Democrat-sponsored bill that would tie the withdrawal of troops in 2008 to a major war funding package. Bush has vowed to veto the bill if it comes to him with a timetable for a pullout.
Bartlett told the CBS television network that the party “respectfully” disagreed with the comments of Dowd, who has a son about to be deployed for service in Iraq.
Dowd defected from the Democrats to join the Bush camp and became chief strategist in the president's 2004 re-election campaign. In the interview, however, he accused Bush of failing to gain a political consensus on the war.
“If the American public says theyre done with something, our leaders have to understand what they want,” the newspaper quoted Dowd as saying. “Theyre saying, 'Get out of Iraq.'”
“I think he's become more … secluded and bubbled-in,” he said of Bush.
A poll published this weekend by Newsweek magazine put Bush's approval rating at just 33 percent, with 57 percent of Americans supporting a phased pullout of US troops from Iraq.
Democrats stuck by the withdrawal bill despite Bush's vow to throw it out. “If he's going to veto, he's going to veto a position that the vast majority of the American people hold,” Democratic Senator Joseph R. Biden told Fox television network on Sunday.
“Ultimately, politically, we have to give him money” for Iraq, Democratic Senator Charles Rangel told NBC. “But we will constantly remind him that no president in these great United States can continue a war that the people do not support.”
On another front, Republicans showed no signs of budging on the White House's refusal to have its top officials testify under oath over the sacked prosecutors.
Critics have said the dismissals were politically motivated and some have called for Gonzales to resign, claiming he made misleading statements over his role in the affair.
Bartlett reiterated Bush's proposal to have Gonzales testify to Congress over the matter, but not let White House aides give recorded testimony under oath.
Gonzales is to be questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the matter on April 17.
It is the biggest in a series of embarrassments for the Bush administration in recent weeks.
Reports of grim conditions and poor out-patient assistance at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which has treated many injured Iraq veterans, led Bush to apologize on Friday to wounded US troops.
And in another case involving the Justice Department, its FBI investigation agency was reported to have breached rules on using counter-terrorism powers to obtain confidential data on suspects.
“Bush is alone,” wrote the veteran conservative columnist Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun Times. He cited unnamed Republicans in Congress accusing the administration of “incompetence,” particularly over the Gonzales affair.
“In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress,” Novak wrote.
