Watching Congress try to nudge George W. Bush toward ending the war in Iraq is much like watching a frustrated landlord deal with a freeloading tenant who keeps promising to pay the rent but never does.

For the umpteenth time, the White House last week at least acted like it was listening to criticism when it allowed 11 moderate House Republicans to visit the president — and bluntly tell him time is running out before the war’s unpopularity exacts an even worse toll on their party than it did in the midterm election.

Despite the political shocker of members from the president’s own party describing for reporters the tough messages they had delivered, the White House downplayed the session as little more than another in a series of routine meetings Bush holds with lawmakers. And on the same day, Vice President Dick Cheney was in Baghdad insisting that “we are making progress” — even though he had to wear a bulletproof vest on his ride to the U.S. Embassy, where insurgents set off a nearby explosion that rattled the windows during his visit.

Even the tough talk from GOP leaders earlier in the week seemed not to faze the Bush camp. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio and Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott of Mississippi, among others in their party, got behind the idea of a September deadline for determining whether the president’s latest “surge” policy is working. Still, both lawmakers kept their options open by taking care not to describe overly specific accomplishments they would want to see before they would abandon the president.

The White House managed to all but ignore the senior Republicans’ pronouncements, instead signaling that a renewal of the surge could be in the works for the period following the supposed September deadline. The Pentagon announced that it had notified another 35,000 troops to be ready to go to Iraq by December.

Given the administration’s history of marketing the war as a series of short-term bursts — which have made it more palatable to the public — it’s easy to imagine the president coming forward this fall to say his war strategy should not be judged until the end of the year. If the pattern continues, he will make a few personnel changes, approve some new tactics that sound promising and renew the “give it a chance” argument that sustained the current surge in troops to Iraq.

No matter how often Bush seems to make changes or appear to be listening to others, the administration always comes back to a “my way or the highway” approach to Iraq. Also last week, Bush threatened another veto, this time for the next congressional effort to draw down troop levels with a war funding bill that potentially expires in July and would set benchmarks for the Iraqi government to get results or lose some of its U.S. aid.

The White House keeps this war going with a combination of ever-changing goals, short-term fixes, rosy assessments and vague promises that the end is near. The emerging result is a bottom-line administration policy that an increasing number of Republicans desperately fear taking to the voters next year: unlimited resources for a war that has no foreseeable end.

Central to the Bush team’s mastery of maintaining an unpopular war has been its unusual approach to funding. Choosing from the start of the war to seek funding in a series of so-called emergency supplemental appropriations bills — which are normally written to respond to unpredictable circumstances, such as natural disasters — the administration has avoided having to defend, or even fully reveal, precisely how much the war is costing. Ending this practice was one of the lesser-mentioned recommendations of the Iraq Study Group last year, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Republican, and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana, a Democrat. “Costs for the war in Iraq should be included in the president’s annual budget request,” the panel concluded. “The normal budget process should not be circumvented. Funding requests for the war in Iraq should be presented clearly to Congress and the American people.”

Bush ignored that advice because funding the war with a series of stopgap measures has helped ease the political pain, breaking up the cost into smaller bites. It is sort of like deciding that paying off the monthly interest on your credit card is all that matters — even though the full amount, including principal, will have to get paid someday. Also, those emergency measures have included lots of spending for more popular needs, such as hurricane relief, and for projects around the country that are supported by influential members of Congress.

This budgetary rope-a-dope worked for Bush so long as his party controlled Congress. But now he’ll be forced to do business with a Democratic congressional majority for the rest of his presidency, and they’re on the verge of winning over more Republicans. So this president might not get his way much longer.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for NBC, MSNBC and CNBC. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.