BUSH  (CONT)

According to last month's Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times national survey, Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin want the next president to move away from Bush's policies.

While the president can veto most initiatives of congressional Democrats, his once-ambitious second-term dreams of overhauling Social Security and the tax system and dealing with America's health-care crisis have evaporated.

The Bush administration will probably get a few relatively small trade deals on the Democrats' terms. These are desirable, though not exactly the stuff of legacies.

What is possible, if more challenging, is a deal on a medium-size energy-global warming package. The president would have to resolve major tensions within his own administration, with Paulson and Vice President Dick Cheney as the most likely adversaries. That's a skill that has eluded him in the past.

And it's his own party that stands in the way of an important achievement on reform of immigration, an area where the president has consistently been enlightened.

Congressional Democrats will pass an immigration bill if - -and this is a big if -- at last a third of Republican lawmakers support liberalized measures.

The risk is that this issue inflames the party's conservatives, who form the nucleus of Bush's dwindling support. The president may already be making too many concessions to the hardliners -- one White House proposal would make it harder for illegal immigrants to become citizens -- to produce a bipartisan immigration breakthrough.

Accordingly, Bush will probably spend much of the next year and a half sparring with critics, including a growing number in his own party, over an Iraq war policy that few believe will succeed.

A year ago, William F. Buckley Jr., the father of contemporary American conservatism, lamented that even if Bush had ``invented the Bill of Rights, it wouldn't get him out of his (Iraq) jam.''

That won't change over the next 616 days.

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