John Podhoretz:

Some of my fellow conservatives found his performance wanting. Or more than wanting. As the show was airing, National Review magazine’s Web site was firing on all cylinders as participants in its blog, The Corner, threw brick after brick at the president.
Talk-show host Michael Graham called it a “disaster.” Rod Dreher, formerly of this paper and now of the Dallas Morning News, said Bush made him wince: “He looked nervous, defensive and intellectually insecure.” The vituperative John Derbyshire called Bush “pretty dismal.”
This is fairly typical of attitudes expressed these days by conservative opinion leaders, who are upset with the administration for a variety of reasons. Some don’t like his immigration proposal. Others are disgusted by the free spending in his budget, particularly on the matter of the prescription-drug benefit.
As a frustrated White House official told me last week, everything the president has done to anger conservatives arises from proposals he made while he was running for president in 2000. They accepted his advocacy of the proposals then, so why are they complaining now? He did not run for president as a small-government conservative, and yet they backed him to the hilt four years ago. So why the enmity today?
It’s a good question, and a sobering one. Recall that conservatives backed Bush in 2000 without knowing just how dreadfully he and this nation would be challenged by the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. They supported him, in other words, when he was merely promising to be a big-spending conservative.
The president they got turned into a great wartime leader, and now some conservatives are griping about how he is actually fulfilling some of the promises they were willing to overlook when they wanted to back a winner four years ago.