“In many ways,” Mr. Hernandez said of Mr. Bush, “I feel like I have grown up with him.”

He is not the only one. Six years into Mr. Bush’s presidency, the corps of loyal Texans who accompanied him to Washington from Austin remains a powerful force inside the administration, a steady source of comfort for an increasingly isolated president. No matter how grim the polls or dire the news in Iraq, they have stood by Mr. Bush — and been rewarded with plum jobs — as their lives have grown increasingly intertwined with one another’s and with his.

“We’ve gotten married, gotten remarried, had babies,” said Margaret Spellings, who was a single mother with two children when she followed Mr. Bush to Washington and has since been promoted from a domestic policy adviser to secretary of education. “I remember the Bush twins when they were just little squirts.”

To hear these people talk about the president is to meet a man many Americans have either forgotten or no longer recognize. Their George W. Bush is the compassionate conservative who helped soften the harsh image of the Republican Party, a man who chokes up at going-away parties, as he did last year for Andrew H. Card Jr., his departing chief of staff; a man unafraid of giving promotions to openly gay people, as he did with Mr. Hernandez, and who always remembers to ask how the family is.

“There’s a lot of devotion to George Bush the person,” said Clay Johnson, a prep school buddy of Mr. Bush who is now a deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Image Israel Hernandez, an assistant secretary of commerce, was a personal aide to George Bush back in 1993. Credit... Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Like another Bush devotee, the first President Bush, these Texans are increasingly angry at criticism leveled at him. Karen Hughes, the communications adviser who famously went back to Texas when her teenage son grew homesick but has since returned as an under secretary of state, says she is tired of seeing Mr. Bush treated as a “caricature.”