American Prospect

This is a pretty good article(scroll down to "Bush's Tolerant Base") and the link to the LA Times article is good too. Basically Bush hasn't been able to unite even his own party. Bush and his team could have all that they have now, including more social reform and a %60 approval rate had they merely gone about everything with more respect to their own party. It ends with this:

"The message in all this seems to be that conservative activists are pathetically easy to buy off -- give them some cheap talk about God and country along with a gay-bashing constitutional amendment that everyone knows won't get through Congress, and they'll give you a free pass on virtually every substantive ideological issue. As long as Bush continues in office, I suspect his core supporters will remain under his spell. But the great risk for the Republican Party is that if he loses, its base will wake up the next day and realize how little they got in exchange for their loyalty. Whether that results in simple conservative demobilization, or in renewed Republican interest in their deeply-unpopular ostensible agenda of rolling back the state, it doesn't spell good news for the GOP. "