Bush Becomes GOP’s Go-To Guy for Fundraising

President Bush will not run for office again, and the next round of congressional elections is more than 16 months away. But the president is already flexing his muscles around the country as a fundraiser.

This month, Bush went to St. Louis and helped freshman Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.) raise $1.5 million for his 2006 reelection bid. On Tuesday, he spoke at a suburban Philadelphia fundraiser said to have netted at least $1.5 million for Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.). Back in Washington several hours later, the president headlined a $23-million GOP fundraiser.

Bush’s fundraising is aimed not only at helping Republican candidates but at helping himself.

Many of his legislative initiatives, most notably his plan to restructure Social Security, are foundering on Capitol Hill, with members of his party openly taking him on.

For example, 50 House Republicans defied Bush’s veto threat and voted last month to loosen restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

That helps explain Bush’s appearance Tuesday at a luncheon in Bryn Mawr, Pa., for Santorum, one of the president’s strongest supporters, who finds himself endangered in his campaign for reelection.

If supporters like Santorum are not in Congress during the final two years of Bush’s second term, the president will likely have trouble getting his proposals into law, some analysts said.

“Even with the slim majorities he has, he’s having an awfully hard time with his agenda,” said Stuart Rothenberg, a Washington political analyst and publisher. “If he loses a handful of [Republican] senators and members in the House, he surely would have to come to grips with the prospect of heading into the lamest of the lame-duck years -- the final two.”

Already this year, Bush has appeared at a dinner that raised $8 million for the National Republican Congressional Committee and at a gala that raised $15 million for the Republican National Committee.

One issue that may have damaged Santorum’s standing with Pennsylvania voters is his support for Bush’s campaign to overhaul Social Security. Santorum is backing Bush’s call to create individual investment accounts, funded with a portion of the Social Security payroll tax. The idea drew support from 33% of respondents nationwide in a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll.

Recent polls in Pennsylvania show Santorum running about 6 percentage points behind state Treasurer Bob Casey Jr., his likely Democratic challenger, said G. Terry Madonna, director of Franklin and Marshall College’s Center for Politics and Public Affairs. Casey is the son of a former popular governor.

Madonna said Santorum had often overcome long odds, confounding Democrats who had underestimated him.

Pennsylvania is what Madonna calls “a light-blue” state. Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, won the state by 130,000 votes -- the fifth-closest margin of any state in 2004.

Santorum has emerged as “the Democrats’ No. 1 target, not just nationally but in Pennsylvania as well,” Madonna said.

He said Democrats wanted to make Santorum “Pennsylvania’s Tom Daschle,” referring to the former Senate Democratic leader who was defeated in 2004 in a campaign that drew resources from Republicans and their allies well beyond Daschle’s home state of South Dakota.

Reporters traveling with Bush on Tuesday were barred from the Santorum fundraising luncheon in the home of Mitchell Morgan, a real estate mogul. Santorum said afterward that his staff had told him the event netted more than $1.5 million.

After the fundraiser, Bush went to a convention of the Pennsylvania Future Farmers of America to promote his Social Security proposal.

Reprising familiar themes, Bush used his speech to lay out the demographic challenges that Social Security was facing from the coming wave of baby boom retirees.

“The easiest path is to do nothing,” Bush told the convention at Pennsylvania State University here. “That’s the easy political path. The tough path is to come together and get something done. But let me tell you something -- by doing nothing, you’re about to hear that we will have done a disservice to a younger group of Americans coming up.”

At the evening fundraiser in Washington, Bush delivered an attack on Democratic lawmakers, accusing them of adopting “the philosophy of the stop sign, the agenda of the road block” in their approach to issues such as changing the tax code, revamping the court system, and affirming his nominees to federal courts and as the United Nations ambassador.

“On issue after issue, they stand for nothing except obstruction, and this is not leadership,” Bush said.

Times researcher Benjamin Weyl contributed to this report.