Gerald Herbert, Associated Press Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald speaks during a press conference yesterday concerning the indictment of I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, on charges of obstruction of justice in the CIA leak investigation.

By James O'Toole, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Less than a year ago, buoyed by a record popular-vote tally, President Bush told a post-election news conference that his victory had given him political capital and that he intended to spend it.

The indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, comes as the president's political capital is nearly spent; whether it can be replenished is the question hanging over the balance of his administration -- and its place in history.

Manuel Balce Ceneta, Associated Press

President Bush addressed the media yesterday, expressing sadness over the indictment of Mr. Libby, who also resigned yesterday as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. MORE COVERAGE Cheney's chief of staff indicted in CIA leak case Libby: A key player who kept a low profile Democrats pound GOP for a culture of corruption The Libby Indictment: A look at the players 7 on Bush team knew Plame was at CIA How the investigation got started A history of indictments A Timeline The indictment documents (p.df format) Updates from the Associated Press

The reform of Social Security, which was to have been Mr. Bush's signature domestic initiative, is moribund. While the administration points to signs of political progress in Iraq, they exist alongside an unabated level of violence that sent the American death toll past 2,000 just days before the charges were filed against one of the key behind-the-scenes architects of that war. On the eve of the Libby indictment, Mr. Bush was politically humbled by the forced withdrawal of his most recent Supreme Court nominee, his close friend and White House Counsel Harriet Miers.

Beyond the serious questions regarding Mr. Libby's own legal fate, the charges against him add to the questions about Mr. Bush's store of governing clout as well as the prospects for his political allies in Congress and in the coming elections. It was widely noted that Jerry Kilgore, the Republican candidate in a close Virginia governor's race, chose to pass up an appearance Mr. Bush made yesterday in Norfolk.

"This makes the White House a little more toxic for any political candidate," said Ken Snyder, a Democratic political consultant who has worked for Pennsylvania's Gov. Ed Rendell among other clients. But GOP analysts insisted that any political damage to the president and the Republican Party could be transitory and reversed by larger events affecting the war and the economy.

"Conceivably, it could have an impact on thing that happen this November," said Republican consultant John Brabender, referring to the pending governors' races in Virginia and New Jersey. "But the way things happen so quickly in this country, it will have minimal impact next November. So many people have asked me about Terri Schiavo's impact, and I don't think most people even remember who Terri Schiavo was," Mr. Brabender said of the comatose Florida woman whose husband fought a long and ultimately successful right-to-die legal battle to disconnect her feeding tube.

Lanny Davis, the lawyer who had the very busy job of overseeing crisis management in the Clinton White House, said the political consequences might be limited. "[President Bush] has a chance of putting it behind him, because Libby is the only one indicted," he said. "If it were [senior political adviser] Karl Rove, it would have been impossible."

Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling and Research, agreed on the long-term impact of the named defendant. "If the only indictment is Scooter Libby, the public will move on pretty quickly. They'll replace him with some other guy that no one ever heard of, and that will be that. ...

"If [Karl] Rove is indicted, that another thing," Coker said. "People see him as an identifiable political operative who's joined to the president at the hip."

It is a measure of the tough week that the Bush White House has endured that yesterday's indictment of a senior national security official fell short of widely anticipated worst-case scenarios.

Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald said the investigation was not concluded, but he warned reporters not to read any expectations of further indictments into that fact. Mr. Rove's lawyer released a statement saying Mr. Fitzgerald had advised them that he had made no decision about charging Mr. Rove, while stating that he was confident that the prosecutor would conclude that his client had done nothing wrong.

Even assuming that no more shoes drop from the Fitzgerald probe, Ken Gormley, a Duquesne University law professor who is an expert on special prosecutors, sees this investigation as having lasting consequences for the Bush administration. Of the immediate task of choosing a replacement nominee for Ms. Miers, Mr. Gormley said: "I don't think Bush is going to have a lot of room to pick anyone too controversial. This is going to push him toward the middle."

Mr. Gormley, who has written a biography of Nixon-era special prosecutor Archibald Cox and is working on another about former President Bill Clinton's nemesis, Whitewater inquiry independent counsel Kenneth Starr, sees lasting debilitation from the cascade of recent blows to the Bush team. "When one of these scandals hits and sticks, it can really throw an administration off stride," he said. "We saw that with Clinton, certainly, as with Iran-Contra [during the Reagan administration], as with Watergate [in the Nixon years].''

Mr. Davis, the veteran of the Clinton wars, had this advice for the president: "If he really were to follow the advice of the political crisis-management rules, he would have Cheney hold a press conference to answer all the questions. That big elephant in the room is what did Cheney know, and when did he know it.

"The second thing would be if he took responsibility for the brainless decision to attack [former Ambassador Joseph] Wilson by talking about his wife [CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson]," Mr. Davis said. "That was a gross misjudgment; if Bush were to acknowledge that that was a mistake and apologize to Valerie Plame, he would lance this boil. ... The likelihood of him doing either is approximately nil."

Mr. Brabender, who will advise GOP candidates including Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum in next year's elections, said the White House has a chance to change the subject by offering some bold new policy challenge. "I do think this is a sort of pivotal moment for this particular White House," he said. "They have to regroup and, in my opinion, they have to focus more on the issues that impact average Americans.

"Americans are always looking for a challenge. They see rising gas prices; if you focused, for example, on a campaign to make us less dependant on foreign oil," Mr. Brabender said. "The time is right for the president to find a bold agenda on something like that, that people can rally around."

To one of the barrage of questions that Mr. Fitzgerald parried yesterday afternoon, he replied insistently, "This indictment is not about the war." But anti-war critics inevitably insisted that it surely was.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the case was "about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president."

Mr. Reid was one of a parade of Democrats, including Sen. John Kerry and the party's national chairman, Howard Dean, who seized upon the charges as evidence and symbol of their contention that the nation had been misled into supporting a war whose rationale, they contend, had more to do with a long-standing geopolitical agenda than the stated concern over Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction.

But some analysts noted that a Democratic focus on the origins of the controversial war is bound to be trumped in public perception by future events in Iraq. In that view, neither the Libby prosecution nor a bid to use it to focus attention on the war's past will be overshadowed by whether the war is now going well or badly.

Gallup Poll Editor-in-chief Frank Newport said, "If current perceptions of the war pick up, and people think the war is doing better, it would have a positive affect [on Bush's job-approval rating], regardless of people's views on the argument on the rationale for the war in the beginning." Mr. Newport noted, moreover, that Bush's current poll numbers are so bleak that he might not experience too much further erosion, even after the battering of the last week.

"I'm not so positive they're going to plummet. He's already hit rock-bottom among Democrats," Mr. Newport said. "For it to drop further, he would have to start losing Republican and Republican-leaning Independents. That could certainly happen, but from what we've seen in the past, sometimes there's a rallying effect after bad news. So it will be interesting to see what [our next poll] shows."

Mr. Newport noted that Mr. Clinton's job-approval rating continued to climb throughout Mr. Starr's inquiry into the president's affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent congressional impeachment proceedings. "But that had a lot to do with the condition of the economy,'' the Gallup chief said.

And with Mr. Bush, he said, "It's the economy and the war in Iraq; Bush's image rests on those two bedrocks."