Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney stepped further Sunday down a potentially treacherous path -- distancing himself from a Republican president who, though generally unpopular, retains the overwhelming support of most of those who will vote in the party's primaries.
In a nationally broadcast television ad and in comments Sunday at Chapman University in Orange, Romney implicitly suggested that the party had gone off course in the years President Bush had been in office and when Republicans controlled Congress.
When one questioner from the Chapman audience described Bush as "one of the most divisive presidents that we've had in a long, long time," the president got no words of support from Romney.
"In Washington, somehow we seem broken," the former Massachusetts governor said. "Washington is a mess."
In the ad, Romney strikes the same note.
"It's time for Republicans to start acting like Republicans," he says, echoing remarks from recent campaign events. "It's time for a change, and change begins with us."
Romney is hardly alone in drawing some careful distance between himself and the current occupant of the White House. But the conflicts involved in laying criticism on a Republican president -- during wartime, no less -- have been apparent.
Visiting California this month, GOP presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Republicans were "very unhappy and frustrated" with the party's direction.
But he also said: "I don't want to blame the president." Even when Huckabee brought up the response to Hurricane Katrina as a reason for the GOP's foul mood, he declined to ascribe blame to Bush.
Fellow candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona has been blistering in his denunciations of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, but far less openly critical of the president for his handling of the Iraq war.
The reason is in the numbers: Republicans who will determine the next GOP presidential nominee continue to support the president. In a recent Gallup poll, nearly 4 of 5 Republicans approved of the way Bush was handling his job.
The tension: The broader pool of general-election voters is far different, siding lopsidedly against Bush.
In Romney's Orange County appearance, which kicked off five days of public meetings and private fundraisers in California, Bush received only one mention, in passing.
But the rebukes were couched generically.
