Those candidates must embrace the action today to align themselves with the conservative activists whose votes and dollars fuel primary races. But tomorrow - when one of them wins the nomination and must compete for independent voters in the general election - they must temper that enthusiasm for a move the electorate said it did not want.

Their greatest hope is that a public planning its holiday beach outings, monitoring pennant races and fretting over terrorist threats is paying little attention to the fate of Libby, a man so highly regarded in this White House that he held top-level jobs advising both the president and Vice President Dick Cheney.

"The media is hyperventilating but that's about all," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a respected political analyst at the University of Southern California. "This is the week of July 4th. People have other things on their agenda."

That probably is true of average voters for whom the Libby drama never rose to the level of other issues such as the Iraq war, terrorism, or even the controversies at the Justice Department. But activists on both sides are more than paying attention. They are deeply involved and closely watching the presidential candidates of both parties for their reactions.

Jeffe said Bush may even move up slightly in the polls just because conservatives who were angry at him over his support for immigration reform might be won back by his decision to commute Libby's sentence.

"It may be that this is what is needed to re-energize the conservative base. If he had not done anything for Libby, they might have just walked. Now, maybe some of those conservatives will come back at least for a week or two."

Some conservatives were not mollified by the commutation, though, and angrily complained that Bush should have gone further and granted a full pardon to Libby.

Wesley Pruden, the conservative editor of the Washington Times on Tuesday mocked Bush's action as a "halfway measure," adding that Bush had ignored "the first rule of politicians and philandering husbands: If you're going to be hanged for stealing a goat, you might as well take a sheep."

Liberals were, not surprisingly, also angry at the commutation, seeing it as further proof of what they already believed - that this White House sees itself as not bound by any rules.

"It's going to harden both sides," said independent pollster John Zogby. "This is one of those issues where one side is from Neptune and the other side is from Pluto. But I don't think there will be a crossover impact or will have much of an impact on undecideds."

Thomas Mann, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, said he sees little movement in public opinion.

"This will reinforce the view of most independents and almost all Democrats that this administration operates above the rules that govern others, making any comeback by Bush even more unlikely than it already is. It will also hearten many activist conservative Republicans dismayed by the president's position on immigration and discouraged by the floundering war in Iraq."

But with Bush very much in early lame duck doldrums, the impact on the presidential candidates is more intriguing. The Republican aspirants Tuesday seemed excessively cautious, praising the commutation but then changing the subject quickly. They displayed little relish for spending their valuable time defending a felon convicted of abusing his high office and lying to the FBI and even less enthusiasm for talking about why the party of "law and order" wants to ignore a jury's decision to protect a friend.

Nor is the issue a completely safe one for the leading Democratic presidential contender. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton joined the other candidates in attacking the commutation as "one more example" of the administration thinking "it is above the rule of law." But the issue brought up bad memories for Clinton, who immediately was forced to defend the controversial pardons issued by her husband, President Bill Clinton, on his final day in office.

Those 140 pardons, she told the Associated Press, were simply routine. They were not, she insisted, like the Libby commutation, which she called "clearly an effort to protect the White House."