01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 14, 2005

OUR NEOCON president, George Bush, has a way of delivering historic declarations that sneak 'round his back and bite him. There was, of course, "Bring 'em on."

"They" are, sadly, still coming on in Eye-Rak, killing people with suicide bombings and ambushes, and demonstrating to the Mideast with bloody homemade videos that "Mission accomplished" is far from accomplished.

Then, too, there is the problematic outcome of his post-electoral bravado: "I've earned capital in this election and I'm going to spend it."

He has been spending it -- like a wastrel -- and has just two pieces of legislation to show for it, more popular with big corporations than with us common folk -- so-called bankruptcy reform that's been termed the "sharecropper" law, and another law curbing class-action lawsuits, to limit our access to courtroom justice.

Any president's second term tends to be troublesome. He is a "lame duck," a term borrowed from England, where it originally described a bankrupt business, later evolving into a label pinned on politically bankrupt office-holders -- i.e., those whose wings have been clipped by presidential term limits, with would-be successors circling like buzzards.

Also, there's that Great Beast, the People, who tend with time to become bored by the same old face and seek the novelty of a fresh one. Current popularity polls see Bush hovering around 45 percent, the lowest of his presidency.

His trials are aggravated by the mounting contradictions inherent in the current edition of the Republican Party, with decisions shaped by neoconservatives who seized power early in the 1990s. On one side, religious conservatives, social conservatives, and corporate conservatives -- the base -- an incongruous bunch united by an administration useful to their separate interests and sharing the same enemies and fictive mantras -- those dastardly liberals who, supposedly, own all the newspapers and broadcasting stations, are closet socialists and traitors, moral relativists, and gather in noisy, un-American groups to oppose the Iraq war.

On the other side are rock-ribbed GOP conservative Originalists, stripped of power along with Nelson Rockefeller at the 1964 GOP convention that nominated Barry Goldwater. Being constitutionally unable, like our Lincoln Chafee, to become Democrats, they have grown increasingly unhappy, as their hallowed principles are torn to tatters under Bush.

Conservative Originalists believe in conserving useful institutions and traditions, changing them in the light of changing times and circumstances, and opposing fiscal irresponsibility. An Originalist abhors budgetary deficits, the erosion of the powers of the states, extremism in the politicization of judges, weakening the separation of church and state, and reckless expansionist international policies.

The Bush ideologues have violated all of these tenets. They are unhappy with the excesses of Bush's leaders in Congress -- the gluttonous Tom DeLay in the House, who puts his family on a generous dole and accepts all-expense-paid overseas junkets by lobbyists, and the ambitious Bill Frist in the Senate, who would be president, and is willing to co-opt the base by branding as anti-Christian any Democrat who opposes the nomination of radical judges, not to mention threatening the time-honored Senate filibuster.

GOP Originalist conservatives believe that the country faces grave issues that go well beyond banning abortion and flag-burning and exploiting the Ten Commandments. They cringe over the abuse of congressional powers, by bypassing state courts to preserve the life of a 15-year-long, brain-dead Floridian.

Emblematic of the growing split are so-called Republican moderates, including Senators Hagel, George Voinovich, Arlen Specter, and the perennially wavering Lincoln Chafee, who seem willing to abandon Party loyalty over the nomination of a bully as U.N. ambassador, and by eroding poll numbers and loud complaints from home.

Extremism in defense of the far-right coalition is increasingly unacceptable, the Originalists believe, when Bush becomes persistently tone-deaf over preserving Social Security and Medicare, over the life-serving need for stem-cell research, dealing with surging fuel costs, and an aggressive defense of the U.S. dollar. The split also includes preserving citizen rights by terminating some of the more restrictive sections of the so-called Patriot Act .

These differences go beyond mere squabbles. They raise the question of whether the Republican Party confronts a realignment over contending philosophies -- true-blue conservatism vs. rigid ideological dogma, contending world-views about how this country should deal with friends and enemies, the proper role of government in safeguarding people's lives, over Bush's free-wheeling economic policies, over his antediluvian anti-science policies that abandon reason and breed ignorance over evolution, stem-cell research, global warming, environmental protection, and alternative energy policy.

All this is bound to be expressed in head-on collisions among contending Republican Congressional and presidential hopefuls. The political fact of life, as conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan put it, is that "the American right is splintering."

Jerry Landay is a former CBS News Correspondent.