THE SPECIAL THEOCON RELATIONSHIP:

United They Fall? (David S. Broder, July 1, 2004, Washington Post)

When news of the handover of authority in Iraq to the new interim government reached him Monday at the NATO summit in Istanbul, President Bush reacted instinctively. He reached out and shook the hand of the man in the next chair, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The handshake, replayed frequently on the BBC, symbolized what many Britons, including both supporters and opponents of Blair's government, consider the strangest and most politically provocative personal alliance in the world -- the partnership that has been struck between the Republican president and the Labor prime minister. [...]

There is no way to sugarcoat one fact of political life: Except for those who are very close to Blair and feel constrained to defend his choice of friends, George Bush is scorned here. His poll ratings are low, and much of the public seems to accept the caricature of him as an impulsive gunslinger. At a luncheon of nine or 10 conservative writers, politicians and strategists at the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank that became influential in Margaret Thatcher's day, the descriptions of Bush began with "recklessly incompetent" and went downhill from there.

A close student of Blair's government says, "No one in the cabinet wants Bush reelected, except perhaps for Blair himself." The prime minister's closest associates are careful about what they say, but one of them concedes that if Bush were gone, it would be much easier to recruit grass-roots volunteers to campaign for Labor candidates next May. [...]

[B]ush is fortunate to have found such a friend in a man whose reputation now stands higher in America than at home. Whether Blair is equally lucky remains to be seen, but he is convinced that nothing could be worse than a U.S. administration left wholly isolated.

Of course he's more popular here--he's an American.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 1, 2004 10:53 AM