President Bush suffered a double-edged loss in the Senate Thursday over drilling in Alaska's arctic wildlife refuge: Lawmakers for the first time delivered a stinging rebuke to a core item in his domestic agenda, and his defeat was engineered by three of his potential Democratic challengers in 2004.
Drilling was at the heart of Bush's energy policies from the moment he took office, and the Republican-controlled Congress obliged him last summer by adopting it as part of its huge energy package.
The 54-46 vote was humbling to an administration accustomed to getting its way most of the time because it denied the president even a rhetorical victory. While Bush and his allies never had a chance of achieving the 60-vote super majority necessary to overcome the Democrats' vow to filibuster, the White House had hoped to be able to brag that at least a majority of lawmakers backed his drilling plan approach.
