5 New Rules Of The Road

By KAREN TUMULTY

When George W. Bush finally pulled his presidency from the Florida swamp, the predictions were dire. Bush would be a man without a mandate, unable to move his agenda through the divided Senate. His plan to use Texas charm to win friends and influence lawmakers was dismissed as laughable, a rube's view of the capital.

Bush has always enjoyed proving the naysayers wrong. And in his first week on the job, he set about doing just that. He invited 90 lawmakers to the White House for meetings that--to their astonishment, after eight years on Clinton time--were tightly managed sessions that began and ended promptly. He doled out nicknames; by his fourth encounter with the gruff, 6-ft. 4-in. California Congressman George Miller, a potential adversary on education, Miller was answering to "Big George"--and Bush was explaining to other lawmakers that "the bilingual among us call him Jorge Grande."

El Presidente even worked his magic on Senators who had been gunning for his most conservative Cabinet nominees. "You know your way around here," he told one of his first guests for coffee in the Oval Office. "Recognize the desk?" And indeed, Edward Kennedy did--it had been his brother's. When Kennedy reached the microphones after the meeting, he was full of praise for Bush's new education plan. They still had their differences over giving vouchers to parents who want to take their children out of failing public schools, Kennedy said, "but I can't emphasize enough the other areas where the President was reaching out." Said an aide to House minority leader Dick Gephardt: "You can't help but like him."

The charm offensive was working just the way Bush had planned it back when the skeptics were making their predictions. "Washington was saying, 'That may have worked in Texas, but it won't work in Washington,'" says Bush adviser Mark McKinnon. "There is nothing he likes to hear more than you can't do something, because it just charges him up to prove that he can."

Bush aides were calling it a dream first week--even before Thursday, when Bush's big across-the-board tax cut got a huge boost from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. The Fed chief, who was the first village elder Bush went to see on his initial trip to Washington as President-elect, put forward last week the mind-bending idea that it was actually possible to pay off the national debt too fast. He told Congress that some sort of tax cut might do "noticeable good" if the economy keeps heading south.

For the first time since the Reagan years, Washington was suddenly in the grip of tax-cut fever--something that hadn't seemed possible during the campaign, when Bush's $1.6 trillion, 10-year plan was scorned by Democrats and even some Republicans. For Bush, it was early evidence of his gift for bringing folks around to his way of thinking. Resistance among Democrats was starting to falter, thanks to internal poll numbers showing increased public interest in the idea. House Democratic leaders huddled at the Library of Congress for six hours last week, meeting with their economists and trying to figure out how to boost the size of their own tax cut. The betting now is that they could add as much as $300 billion in new tax breaks, for a total of $600 billion to $800 billion in reductions--about half the size of Bush's. And this week's new and probably higher surplus estimates from the Congressional Budget Office should strengthen Bush's hand even more.

Good luck and good cheer, of course, get a new President only so far; strategy and gamesmanship have to take him the rest of the way. And Bush demonstrated a knack for those things as well. The most surprising news from his first working day in the Oval Office came from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, when Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, to the dismay of his fellow Democrats, announced that he was joining forces with Phil Gramm of Texas--one of their least favorite Republicans-- to co-sponsor Bush's tax-cut plan. What Miller and Gramm didn't announce was that their matchmaker had been Bush. Both Senators told Time that Miller had quietly offered his support to Bush a month earlier. "I'm going to be with you on a lot of things," Miller told him after a meeting on education in Austin. "I'm going to be with you on the tax cut." Bush got the word to Gramm, who hatched the collaboration idea with Miller on a Banking Committee trip to Mexico two weeks later.

Score one for the Texas Method. But Bush's matchmaking promptly got out of hand. He didn't want Miller and Gramm to announce their tax bill last week. He planned to dedicate the week to education, with taxes not taking center stage until at least a month later, after he'd had time to work out a budget. But taxes broke out early and stepped on his education news. So score one for Washington, because--as even a dream first week proved--Bush still has plenty to learn about the rules of the road in the capital. Consider these five lessons from the new President's first days at work:

1 You can't control the agenda. Gramm, one of the capital's most notorious spotlight bandits, wasn't willing to make his move on Bush's timetable. "When a pot starts to boil," Gramm says, "you don't have the luxury of saying, 'Wait a minute. I want to deal with what's in the oven.' You have to stir it, or it boils over." And in Washington, as Bush is finding out, someone is always ready to turn up the heat. No one tells Greenspan what to say or when to say it. If the chairman's remarks had been less supportive, Bush would have found his Education Week awash in bad tax-cut press. Chalk one up to beginner's luck.

2 You can't control your friends, let alone your enemies. If Bush was bringing a new era of good feeling and understanding to Washington, someone forgot to tell Tom DeLay. At Wednesday morning's bipartisan congressional leadership meeting in the White House, the House majority whip was not playing nice. When talk turned to campaign-finance reform, DeLay implored the President to shut down the McCain-Feingold bill, which would ban all soft-money contributions. "We've got to figure out a way to stop this," DeLay told Bush, as Democrats shifted uncomfortably in their seats. "That would help those of us who are freedom-oriented and Constitution-oriented." The Democrats exchanged glances. They knew Bush hates the McCain-Feingold bill as much as DeLay does, and suspected that the whip was saying what Bush was thinking. Bush just sipped his coffee and refused to commit, saying he would be meeting with McCain later that day.

3 Charm has its limits. When the Bush-McCain meeting took place, the Arizona Senator was considerably more cordial than DeLay. But when the meeting was over, Bush and McCain were no closer to agreeing on campaign-finance reform, an issue over which they fought bitterly during the primaries. Bush wanted McCain to postpone introduction of the bill; the Senator wouldn't budge. McCain thinks he finally has the 60 votes it takes to break a filibuster, and he is determined to press ahead. On Friday, he reached a deal with Senate majority leader Trent Lott to bring the bill to the Senate floor before Congress's Easter recess in April. It promises to be a brutal fight.

4 If a problem is big, it's your problem. Two weeks ago, President-elect Bush might have had the luxury of telling California to take care of its energy crisis, but five days later, President Bush found himself ordering reluctant power producers in neighboring states to keep their generators on overdrive for an additional two weeks. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the move was designed to give the nation's most populous state a little breathing room while it figures its way out of its crisis. And this time, the White House insists, Bush means it: no more federal help. But even as Greenspan was delivering his favorable assessment on tax cuts, he warned that California's troubles could drag down the entire national economy--which would make the mess Bush's problem once again.

5 Know when to fight and when to fold. As Bush launched the education initiative that he vows will be his biggest priority as President, the question for most Democrats was whether he would cling to the idea of giving vouchers to parents who want to take their children out of failing public schools. Early signs are that he won't. Bush downplayed that element in announcing the proposal, and signaled to congressional Democrats that he won't let it be a deal breaker--especially since there is broad consensus on the rest of his plan, which gives states more money and flexibility in exchange for holding them accountable for results.

Bush proved as Governor that he knew when to compromise and proclaim victory. In 1997, when he couldn't get his ambitious tax-reform program through the Republican state senate, he settled for a $1 billion tax cut--and bragged on it all the way to a landslide re-election. A politician, he learned back then, can sometimes get as much by avoiding a fight as by winning one. And that's a rule of the road in Washington and Austin alike.

--With reporting by John F. Dickerson and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by John F. Dickerson and Douglas Waller/Washington