Rumbles Right and . . . Right - Conservative worries about W.

How smitten are conservatives with George W. Bush? One famously unsparing activist, Paul Weyrich, recently told the New York Times, "I personally love this president." Conservatives have been quite happy with the administration's center-right course, rooting for it in its dealings with a closely divided Congress. But several trouble spots are developing. Conservatives are beginning to express concerns about the administration on taxes, education, the environment, and the president's faith-based initiative.

The concerns about Bush's tax-cut proposal are both tactical and substantive. Since he unveiled his tax-cut program on the campaign trail, the surplus has grown and the economy has weakened. Conservatives in the House have responded to these developments by proposing a larger package that takes effect faster. But Bush has said the tax cut shouldn't get any bigger, and Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill has even joked that Bush might fire him if Congress passes deeper tax cuts. So with a bigger tax bill in the House ruled out, the president is left negotiating with senators who want a smaller one. The plan can only shrink. Conservative discontent has mainly been confined to the op-ed pages and the Hill, but it could spread to the grass roots. Already, Rush Limbaugh has warned, "They are watering down this cut to the point it isn't a cut." Conservatives may grow more restive when they hear that the administration has signaled that it would accept less than a full repeal of the death tax, despite the fact that Congress comfortably passed a repeal in its last session.

Pro-family activists and their supporters in Congress have principled objections to Bush's version of marriage-penalty relief, which provides a 10 percent deduction for two-earner couples, but no relief for single-earner families. Phyllis Schlafly labels the result a "homemaker penalty," courtesy of the Bush White House. Although Congress last year approved a bill extending relief to all married couples, the administration continues to insist on its own version. A top conservative aide in the House sees a fight ahead-one the White House will lose. "We don't have a choice, we have to do what we did last year," he explains. The ultimate size and shape of this year's inevitable tax cut will depend on how Bush defines victory; conservatives hope they don't end up feeling defeated.

The same is true on education reform: When the president unveiled his proposal, following a flurry of photo ops with Democratic lawmakers, it looked as if he were mining the most promising vein for bipartisan cooperation. It appeared that lots of new spending might buy Democratic support for some conservative actions, such as creating limited voucher programs and giving states flexibility in how they spend education grants. But the landscape has changed in just a few short weeks. In what is always a dismaying sign for conservatives, the Senate education panel unanimously approved some provisions of the president's plan, but postponed the most controversial reforms for consideration by the entire Senate. Conservative reformers expect the final Senate product to be a bill that Ted Kennedy will like.

Meanwhile, in the House, Republicans are insisting that the White House not abandon the choice and flexibility reforms. They also want the White House to modify its national-testing provision to ensure that states aren't made to adopt uniform standards or curricula. The House education committee is drafting a bill that addresses these concerns. A committee GOP aide explains, "The last thing we want to do is drop a bill and have 70 Republicans shoot arrows at it." But Democrats are equally adamant in their opposition to vouchers and state flexibility. Colorado Republican Bob Schaffer explains that "many of my Democratic colleagues built careers on these programs with their red tape." Whipsawed by Left and Right, Bush may not be able to pass an education bill that House Republicans support.

Another problem area has been environmental policy. Statements by administration officials about regulating carbon-dioxide emissions made the free-market environmental community "very nervous," according to Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Conservatives' chief worry had been about the appointment of Christine Todd Whitman to head the Environmental Protection Agency, so-Smith explains-they were blindsided when it turned out to be Treasury Secretary O'Neill who started aggressively promoting Al Gore's pet global-warming theory: "While we were watching the Whitman front, we got surprised that someone as powerful as the Treasury secretary is playing in this area." At the first Bush cabinet meeting, O'Neill distributed copies of a speech he gave in 1999 to the Aluminum Association in which he compared global warming to a nuclear holocaust.

Some key officials in the White House, the State Department, and the EPA are Clinton-Gore appointees who haven't yet been replaced. Smith thinks these holdovers are trying to "trap the administration in a global-warming policy before conservatives get into the administration in adviser roles." But, in a major victory for the free marketeers, Bush has since announced that he will not, after all, impose mandatory carbon-dioxide standards on power plants-which had been a key goal of the global-warming doomsayers.

The negative reaction of conservatives to one component of the president's faith-based initiative does appear to have persuaded the White House that a modification is in order. Sympathetic critics like Marvin Olasky and the Hudson Institute's Michael Horowitz raised concerns about the potentially corrupting effect of federal grants to religious groups.

In short order, the Washington Post was reporting, "Faith Initiative May Be Revised." Don Eberly, the deputy director of the White House office charged with implementing the initiative, cited the "friendly criticism" that merited a reevaluation of the proposed grant program.

Aside from the growing controversy over the administration's bizarrely Gore-like environmental policy, the White House has been careful to avoid provoking conservative displeasure with its agenda. If Don Eberly's recognition of "friendly criticism" that warrants an adjustment in administration policy represents how the Bush White House intends to deal with its conservative supporters, they could be settling in for a nice long honeymoon.