WASHINGTON — President Bush will now follow the lead of the late Dwight Eisenhower by vetoing a comprehensive farm bill.

Bush, though, is no Eisenhower.

Yesterday, the Senate, by a comfortably veto-proof 81-15 margin, approved a farm bill that now faces the resistant White House.

Bush says he'll veto the five-year package, much as Eisenhower nixed a big farm bill in April 1956.

Eisenhower won his showdown, the last time a president vetoed a major standalone farm bill. Bush, on the other hand, will lose.

The House of Representatives and Senate now have both approved the farm bill by more than the two-thirds vote needed to beat a veto.

"Mr. President, you and your people have been at the table for more than a year," Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, declared yesterday morning. "It's time you recognize the value of this project."

Craig was one of 35 Republican senators to abandon Bush yesterday and support the farm bill.

On Wednesday, 91 GOP House members voted for the bill, defiantly boosting the House's approval to a veto-proof margin of 318-106.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republicans' presumptive presidential candidate, missed the vote yesterday but said he opposes the bill.

Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois both support the bill, but they likewise missed the vote.

"I know we're not going to stop this bill," Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., conceded yesterday, adding, "We're on an unsustainable fiscal course."

The chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, termed the legislation "a great bipartisan bill" on which lawmakers have "worked together for a year and a half."

The bill largely retains traditional crop subsidies while boosting fruit and vegetable spending. The bill devotes two-thirds of its dollars to nutrition programs and food stamps, which are renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Critics say the bill relies on gimmicks to camouflage its true costs.

The bill's authors use one set of budget assumptions to put the five-year price tag at $289 billion, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates that from 2008 to 2012, "spending on the programs ... (the bill) covers would be about $307 billion."