The maturing of Bush as lobbyist-in-chief

Back in President Bush's first days, as he started shaping his relationship with Congress, he was seen as a kind of detached CEO - with charm.

He was an über-delegator who would proclaim his principles and then let others - especially Vice President Cheney - hammer out details.

But how quickly things change.

By last week, Mr. Bush had transformed into a scrappy street fighter, making one-on-one deals with key lawmakers.

Partly, this is just the way of Washington: Top players making last-minute blitzes to seal the hard deals. Yet, it's also the story of a president's evolving style and strategy - of increasing engagement with a Congress of shifting coalitions and razor-thin margins.

What's emerging is a president with a new hands-on style that is beginning to elicit favorable comparisons with famous arm-twisters like President Johnson and charmers like President Reagan.

From the start, the new Bush administration promised to work with Congress in a bipartisan way. A successful early meeting in Austin, Texas, between the president-elect and key lawmakers on the Hill to discuss education set high expectations. Centrist Democrats assumed they would be next to the White House for heart-to-hearts on the proposed tax cut.

It never happened. When it came down to governing, the new president kept his distance from Capitol Hill. His signature tax cut was blitzed through the House, without even a hint of smoozing for Democratic support.

Instead, the president took his charm offensive outside Washington, including campaign-style swings through states with Bush-leaning electorates to pressure key Democratic lawmakers, like then-Senate minority leader Tom Daschle (D) of South Dakota and the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad (D) of North Dakota. But the tour fell flat.

"If you take your case to the people and the people yawn, members of Congress are aware of that," says George Edwards, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Democrats later boasted that the president's trip didn't produce a single new Democratic vote.

In the end, he won his tax cut without the appearance of compromise or personal engagement with fence-sitters. But the 50-50 margin in the Senate was a constant reminder that the numbers that supported the strategy could at any moment change.

"His early position was to go for broke," says Stephen Hess, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "That was Strategy 1, when he had tenuous control over Congress. But he was always living on borrowed time."

Time ran out, when Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords walked out of the Republican Party in June, taking GOP control of the Senate with him. Loss of the Senate meant that the president could no longer count on disciplined party-line votes - or the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Cheney in the Senate - to get him victories.

At the same time, the Jeffords defection strengthened the hand of Republican moderates, who began openly breaking with the president's agenda on issues like the environment, faith-based initiatives, and patients' rights. "At that point, after the Jeffords defection, we began to find out how good a politician he really is," says Mr. Hess.

In his first six months on the job, Mr. Johnson got a tax cut and a civil rights bill through Congress. Once elected in his own right in 1964, he pushed through a dizzying series of Great Society programs. He was famous for applying the "Johnson treatment" - bullying and berating members into compliance.

Yet for Johnson, it was far more than just the mythic personal style that got things done. A strong liberal coalition in Congress was essential for passing his reforms.

Mr. Reagan, too, had early support on the Hill, especially from the Republican-led Senate. This helped him pass a big tax cut and begin a military build up.

"He had some glorious success on a very few items that were very big," says Professor Edwards. "But it all took place in a few months in 1981 and came in the wake of the assassination attempt, which boosted public sympathy."

Bush had to create his own political momentum. And, ironically, the Jeffords defection - and its fallout - may have helped him do it by forcing the president into a hands-on engagement with Congress.

In June, some 70 Republicans split with the White House over drilling off the coast of Florida. GOP moderates said that they could not go along with an emphasis too heavily skewed toward energy production. In response, Bush began face-to-face meetings with key moderates on this issue.

"He is a charmer, no question about it, but he is also a listener," says Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R) of New York, who led the "green" revolt to the president's energy plan within the GOP. He says he spoke with the president "regularly" in the runup to last week's energy vote in the House.

"I told him that the president is not properly positioned in the eyes of the American people, and that he needs to be more supportive of environmental issues," he added.

In the end, the Republican energy bill passed the House, with its two most controversial provisions - drilling in the Alaskan wilderness and very limited mandates for fuel efficiency - intact.

In the runup to last week's vote on the patients' bill of rights, Bush met with 64 House members. The last days (R) of Georgia, a longtime sponsor of bills on patients' rights. When Norwood fell in line, the votes in the House quickly followed.

As Congress adjourned for the summer, the president declared victory. But in the fall, he faces an even tougher political battle in the Senate. To win there, the president will have to stay even more engaged with Congress, Republican leaders say.

"He is going to have to do some work on both sides, bipartisan work, and he is going to have to work to get these things resolved and in conferences in the Senate as well," House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R) of Illinois told reporters last week.

But he heads into the new battles with the beginning of a record in wresting compromises out of Congress, one vote at a time. "This president has something now that is almost Reaganesque - loudly promoting devotion to fixed principles that could not be compromised, then compromising, then loudly declaring victory," says Mr. Hess. "It shows he is far more of a pragmatist than he was ever given credit for being."