PRESIDENT BUSH’S much-vaunted domestic reform is in deep trouble and threatening his second term hopes of significant achievement at home.

Senior Republicans in Congress are backing away from Mr Bush’s proposals to part-privatise the state pension, leaving their chances of success hanging by a thread.

The White House has responded by going on the offensive. Mr Bush and his senior officials yesterday began a “60 stops in 60 days” tour around the country to try to persuade wary lawmakers and a sceptical public that the imminent retirement of the baby-boom generation means that the Government has to act.

But the tide has, for the moment, turned against the President on the issue. A poll for the Pew Research Centre showed support had fallen eight points since December and 12 points since September to 46 per cent.

In a Gallup poll yesterday only a third of Americans supported Mr Bush’s plans, which involve diverting part of an individual’s social security taxes into private accounts linked to the stock market.

Nearly 70 per cent think lowering state benefits, the flip side of the reforms, to be a bad idea, according to a New York Times poll.

Many other second term policies are facing similar problems, even though both the Senate and House of Representatives are Republican-controlled.

Tom DeLay, the powerful Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, has declared that the President’s plan to extend an amnesty to illegal Mexican immigrants is all but dead. Similarly, lawmakers have made clear that large parts of Mr Bush’s budget stand little hope of passing. The austere document is aimed at halving America’s $430 billion (£226 billion) budget deficit by 2009, a key campaign pledge.

But congressional representatives from the mid-West and other arable areas have made clear the budget’s proposed large cuts in farm subsidies are unlikely to go anywhere.

The size of the deficit, and forecasts that show that even if it is trimmed over the next four years it will rocket again after that, have dimmed the appetite among some lawmakers for the further tax cuts Mr Bush wants.

Cutting healthcare costs before the baby-boom generation starts retiring is another Bush priority that looks unlikely to win congressional approval.

Mr Bush has won a minor victory over reining in sky-high damages awards by juries. But a larger battle looms over medical malpractice awards in particular.

The grim news on the home front is in stark contrast to successes abroad.

US officials have been ordered to adopt a strict “no gloating” stance in public. But Bush aides believe that the stirrings of democracy in Lebanon and Egypt to be a direct result of the successful elections held by Palestinians and Iraqis, themselves born of American foreign policy.

Back home, the post-mortems have already begun over how the White House has botched the selling of Mr Bush’s pension plan, the heart of his domestic agenda.

Critics of the strategy say that Mr Bush was foolish to put so much emphasis on remote dates — 2018, the moment at which the pension fund will start paying out more than it is taking in, and 2042, when it notionally goes bust.

Times Recommends

• The Japanese Prime Minister is doomed: or is he?
• Brighton company 'involved in cyber attack'
• The art of survival: it’s all in the mind