The campaign flier is elegantly done. One page on fine stock paper, multicolored on both sides, with a detailed list of the money and projects Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Jim Gerlach has brought to his 6th District. There's a photograph of the handsome two-term congressman and several hundred words outlining his record in this elegant mailing to his constituents.

One word, however, is conspicuously missing: Republican. Instead, the mailing bills Gerlach as "An Independent Voice, Working for You." You could have fooled the disgraced ex-House GOP majority leader Tom DeLay, who brooked no independence among GOP troops in his leadership days. His PAC ponied up money for Gerlach's last campaign. But it's a reflection of how things have changed in Republican ranks.

DeLay is under indictment for laundering corporate contributions into GOP campaign coffers. And more than a few Republican House members who face difficult re-election races are doing their darnedest these days to distance themselves from the klutzy Bush White House and the Republican record in Washington.

Gerlach is typical of these under-fire Republicans. He's a moderate by any reading of GOP ideology, a member of the Republican Main Street Partnership, which supports embryonic stem cell research in defiance of Bush administration policy. The Philadelphia suburbs that make up his district are historically Republican -- but only narrowly and with a growing tendency to favor the occasional Democrat.

In 2004, Sen. John Kerry carried Gerlach's district over President Bush. Gerlach has failed to get more than 51 percent of the vote in either of his election victories. As a consequence, he ranks near the top of the Democratic target list of Republican House members who, the Democrats believe, can be made to pay the price for Bush's fall from favor.

Seen in that light, Gerlach's shyness about his Republican lineage is not so much treachery or deception as a recognition of reality: You could get hurt at the polls running as a Republican with ties to the Bush-Cheney team this year, especially in suburban America.

The Gerlach scenario is on view in the suburbs surrounding big cities everywhere outside the South -- Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles. Republican House members are struggling to put some distance between themselves and the beleaguered Bush.

For many, the disillusionment with the White House began with the president's hare-brained scheme to privatize part of Social Security. After first applauding the proposal, GOP House members fled like quail hunters at word that Dick Cheney was in the woods. It represented their first real, if subdued, break with the president. Bush's bungled response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster caused more grumbling in Republican ranks, reinforced this week with the revelation that he was warned that the New Orleans levees might not hold.

Cheney's hunting misadventure didn't help; it seemed to underscore the administration ineptitude. Now Bush has stumbled again with his handling of the deal that would turn over management of portions of six American ports to a company owned by an Arab country.

Bush is taking a bum rap on the port deal. As he notes, the Dubai company is run by American executives and, in any case, port security would remain the province of the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs. But the fact that he didn't know about the deal until a few days ago suggests a lazy, out-of- touch president. Worse yet from the standpoint of Republicans running for re-election is the suspicion that Bush and his team have become tin-eared politically. Even 58 percent of Republicans say they oppose the port deal.

"How could Karl Rove let this happen?" is the familiar GOP complaint in Washington.

The collapse of the administration's standing in the country is unusual and cause for alarm. Bush's personal rating in the latest CBS poll is an anemic 34 percent; Cheney's is even lower, with an 18 percent rating that's virtually a demand for his resignation. (Even Richard Nixon wasn't that low on the eve of his resignation.)

And it's not likely to get much better. In the months ahead, the political spotlight will shift, unflatteringly, to the courtroom as the larcenous lobbyist Jack Abramoff recounts his dealings with the Republican-run Congress and Lewis "Scooter" Libby tells just which of his "superiors" gave him the green light to expose Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. And Iraq could yet slip into civil war.

Jim Gerlach probably won't be the only Republican this fall heading for the high grass and the hills.