As President Bush stands firmly behind approving the proposed takeover of American port operations by a Dubai-owned firm, many conservative commentators who have been among his staunchest supporters have parted company with the president and joined calls to scuttle the acquisition.

The editor of the American Conservative magazine, Scott McConnell, said that Mr. Bush is seeing a significant erosion of support from quarters that were usually friendly. “There’s a kind of red state, populist, don’t-tread-on-me kind of conservative that Bush has always been able to rely on in his foreign policy. I think the White House is losing that,” he said in an interview. “These folks are no globalists and they’re not enthusiastic about free trade and are more skeptical about immigration.”

“Kill the deal, Mr. President,” a former education secretary under President Reagan, William Bennett, wrote this week on the National Review Web site. The key question, he argued, is not whether the United Arab Emirates has helped fight terrorism, but whether the country was doing anything to advance the goals of democracy that Mr. Bush has talked so much about.

“To defend this deal is to defend a $7 billion arrangement with a country that has never had a democratic party in its entire existence,” Mr. Bennett observed in an essay co-authored by a conservative colleague, Seth Leibsohn. They scoffed at Mr. Bush’s suggestion that prejudice was the only reason to be more suspicious about a firm that hails from Dubai, DP World, than the British company currently running the American ports.

“What kind of a signal are we sending by making a public ally of a country that refuses democracy and does not recognize the existence of its most democratic neighbor because it is considered to be inhabited by members of the wrong religion?” the conservative critics asked, making reference to the refusal of the United Arab Emirates to recognize Israel. “Who are the real xenophobes here?”

While some conservative pundits have been more cautious in their response, there has been no rush to defend Mr. Bush’s handling of the matter. “To me the amazing part of this is the kind of political tone deafness of the whole thing,” a vice chairman of the American Conservative Union, Donald Devine, told The New York Sun. “The political antenna is dead or something.”

Mr. Devine said Mr. Bush compounded the trouble by insisting both that he knew nothing about the port deal before it was approved and that he would veto any effort to block it. “How do you say he threatens a veto, and he wasn’t in on this?” the conservative activist asked.

One of the most unabashed cheerleaders for the port deal is an investment banker and television host, Lawrence Kudlow. “Allow me to give this episode its proper name: Islamophobia,” Mr. Kudlow wrote for National Review last week. “None of the eager critics of this business transaction can furnish a scintilla of evidence that the Bush administration hasn’t done its security due diligence on DP World…. Instead, what we have here is a perfect storm of bipartisan criticism based on a combination of nearsighted protectionism and xenophobic anti-Arab sentiment.”

On his CNBC program Wednesday, Mr. Kudlow threw softball questions at four commentators, all of whom backed the takeover and echoed his criticism. Earlier in the show, Mr. Kudlow did interview Senator Dorgan of South Dakota, a Democrat opposed to the deal.

Some prominent conservatives, such as talk show host Rush Limbaugh, have been harder to pin down. Last week, Mr. Limbaugh called the reaction to the port deal “a perfect panic.” This week, he called the flap “a political disaster,” but insisted, “Economically, it is a good deal.”

The equivocation led one of the leading critics of the deal, Rep. Peter King, a Republican of Long Island, to allege in an interview with WABC radio that Mr. Limbaugh had “gone into the tank.”

Another vigorous defender of the deal is a former Republican congressman and avid free-trade advocate, Jack Kemp. “To turn down this contract would further weaken our relationships with moderate Arab allies,” he wrote in a column for Copley Newspapers.

One strain of support for the deal has come from those who advocate closer ties between the Republican Party and Arab-Americans. One longtime backer of such an alliance is a prominent anti-tax activist, Grover Norquist. Last week, he predicted that the ports flap was about to blow over. “The only whiners left by next week will be the registered bigots,” Mr. Norquist said. He did not return a call seeking comment for this story.

For now, the furor is showing no sign of dying down, as some conservatives lash out at those who have described critics of the deal as racist.

“I must express bottomless disgust with those on the Right who have turned into mush-mouthed race-card players to shift blame away from President Bush for his miserable mishandling of the situation,” columnist and author, Michelle Malkin, wrote.

The timing of the port deal’s approval may also have hurt its political palatability in America. Just before that news broke, TV screens were dominated by pictures of widespread rioting in the Muslim world over cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. Intense sectarian violence in Iraq has also undermined Mr. Bush’s arguments that followers of Islam are generally peaceful.

“The one element you add to the usual split on the trade axis and xenophobia axis is the genuine puzzlement about what’s going on in the Middle East,” a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Steven Hayward, said in an interview. He said even well-educated conservatives friendly to Mr. Bush’s calls for democracy are having doubts about whether the populace in the Arab world is ready.

“You do see a split between a lot of conservatives,” Mr. Hayward said. He said more conservatives seem to be adopting the notion that a clash of civilizations is inevitable because Islam is incompatible with democracy. “I have to say I resist this view myself, sort of a ‘Screw ’em all. It’s ridiculous.'”

Mr. Devine of the American Conservative Union said that ultimately the deal is in trouble not because of pundits, but because the idea of handing American ports over to an Arab country makes the average American jittery.

“The problem is that on the face of it, it sounds unbelievable,” he said. “There is an enormously large camp that does look at this in a very stereotypical way, into which my own relatives would fit. You should understand how normal people think.”

Mr. Devine said the administration was blindsided in part because of its penchant for secrecy and minimal outside consultations. “A lot of their mistakes are the result of this bunker mentality,” he said. “You keep winnowing down the people you’ll talk to and pretty soon you’re talking to yourself.”