Dick Armey likes to say that his first waking thought is how to make the day unbearable for Democrats. So when you hear the House majority leader fairly purring about one of them--particularly one who happens to be the new White House budget chief--it's time to wonder: Has the thawing of partisan hatred begun? Is progress in the air? Or is someone about to get rolled?
The Democrat in question is Frank Raines, 48, who is, as Armey sweetly puts it, "a serious guy who understands what needs to be done and is going to do his level best to do it. He is a man who strikes me as not having a lot of guile, and in a Democrat that's refreshing." Across Capitol Hill the reviews by other Republicans are just as glowing. "It's obvious he tries very hard to understand our side," says Pete Domenici, the Senate Budget Committee chairman.
The first and most important trial of the second Clinton Administration begins this week, when the President sends his budget to Congress. The question of what comes next will be the one that counts this year because Republicans and Democrats know that agreeing on the numbers is the only work they absolutely must get done. If the two sides can't come together on this, there is little reason to think they can do anything else that matters.
Which is why it may be appropriate that the courtly Franklin Delano Raines, who has been head of the Office of Management and Budget for less than a year and has no experience in the political warfare of shutdowns and put-downs, is sitting at the head of the table. "We all know how to do the fight," he says. "We just think it's not productive for the country."
His earnest courtship of congressional Republicans has resulted in one early, tentative payoff. For once, no one's lips are forming the words "dead on arrival" to describe the President's plan. But they are guarded. "I'm not sure he has the political stroke yet to get done what he knows has to get done," Senate majority leader Trent Lott told TIME. "I know the budget they're sending up here next week will not be as honest and will have more gimmicks in it than he wanted."
Old congressional hands may regard Raines' style as a bit naive, but in some ways it represents how the second Clinton Administration is rearranging its priorities. "He gets it," says Vice President Al Gore, a longtime friend, who recruited Raines for the job. "In a relatively short time as OMB director, he has acquired perfect pitch." It comes in part from his training as an investment banker, which he shares with the two other prominent members of Clinton's negotiating team, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles. Theirs is a culture in which winning is cutting the deal and the politician's concept of a strategic defeat--to fail now so you can triumph later--is just money wasted. That Raines should find himself on the front lines at this moment is also the culmination of a personal voyage in which he managed to take a Democrat's life story and turn it into a Republican's resume.