5 New Rules Of The Road

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: