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"among ideological and intellectual conservatives, emotional support for Bush is starting to ebb" reports Jonah Goldberg, just back from the New York State Conservative convention. Quotable:

.. if you pay attention to what conservatives are saying at meetings and in magazines, on the Web and at the think tanks, as well as what readers, friends, colleagues and sources say, there's a definite undercurrent of discontent with the president. For some it started with his plan to offer amnesty-lite to illegal immigrants. For others, it's his fence-sitting on gay marriage. For others, like me, it was his signing of the campaign finance reform bill even though he thought it was unconstitutional. Or maybe it was his support for steel tariffs. Or the farm bill. I forget. Anyway that doesn't matter. What unites pretty much all of these grumblers is a deep sense of, well, disgust with how much this administration is spending .. There may be good aspects to George Bush's "compassionate conservatism," though on the whole I never liked it, but it's clear that compassion doesn't come cheap at the Bush White House, on whose watch overall spending from 2001 to 2003 grew at 16 percent and discretionary spending went up 27 percent. That's double Bill Clinton's rate ..

And this:

yes, conservatives understand that the GOP is practically the only place they have a real impact in electoral politics. But I'm not sure George Bush understands how much he is asking from those who brought him to the dance.

oh, go ahead and read the whole damn thing.