5 New Rules Of The Road

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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.