Opinion: President Bush endures as a potent fund-raiser

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Another useful reminder today about President Bush: even as his approval ratings remain abysmal, even as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama routinely treat him as a pincushion, and even as John McCain implicitly criticizes aspects of the administration’s foreign policy, a hard core of loyalists still are willing to fork over money when Bush comes calling on behalf of the Republican Party.

The Washington Times reports today that with 2008 not quite a third over, the president so far has generated more than $30 million for various GOP groups and candidates -- close to half of what he raised all of last year for various party coffers.

The story notes that Tuesday night, he headlined a $2-million fund-raiser at a home in Virginia for McCain’s presidential campaign. Earlier, he made a successful financial foray into Florida.

And today, he was adding to his bottom-line figure.

After delivering his latest discourse on the war in Iraq at the U.S. Air Force’s National Museum in Dayton, Ohio, Bush and his entourage drove to a nearby neighborhood for a fund-raiser to benefit the state’s Republican Party (which needs the help after the bath it took in the 2006 midterm election).

The report provided to other members of the media by the Washington Post’s Peter Baker recorded that Bush’s motorcade ‘snaked through a new neighborhood known as Willow Creek Farm, a community of massive houses ...

with long driveways, multi-car garages, pools, pool houses and five-acre grassy lots.’

Hosting the gathering was Marty Grunder, chief executive of a landscaping firm.

This evening, before returning to the White House, he’ll be the star attraction at a similar event in Sewickley, Pa.

Less than a third of the nation may give Bush good grades these days, according to the polls, but that’s enough to provide a steady supply of the proverbial mother’s milk of modern politics.

-- Don Frederick