He strode alone into the Rose Garden and complained that "it has now been 57 days" since he asked Congress for more money for the Iraq war and still has not gotten it. For President Bush, the fight over war-spending legislation has become the only talking point -- an opportunity, his strategists hope, to demonstrate strength and turn the tables on a Democratic Congress that may be overreaching.

But as he answered questions yesterday before heading off for an Easter break, Bush was confronted with another narrative, this one about friends and voters losing faith in his leadership. He is not, he said in response to a question, more "isolated from his own party in Congress" than any president of the past half-century, as one conservative columnist wrote. He has not, he said, lost his "gut-level bond with the American public," as the chief strategist of his 2004 campaign wrote.

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