Bush's Cool Operator

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If Democrats, for their part, seem apoplectic over Medicare, it's also because the Republicans have stolen the issue from them. And Frist, as much as any other Republican, is the one who helped take it away. He kept top Democrats like minority leader Tom Daschle from the conference that wrote the bill, not an unheard-of maneuver against a Senator of lesser rank but a brassy one to be pulling on the chamber's top Democrat. Instead Frist handpicked the Democratic Senators he would negotiate with: Louisiana's John Breaux, who worked with him on a Medicare-reform panel and who shares his views; and Montana's Max Baucus, who was just as eager to cut a deal.

Shut out of the room, a hapless Daschle tried to play an outside game--rallying seniors against the measure. But Frist outfoxed him. He began huddling privately with top AARP officials last December and held some 15 meetings with them over the next 11 months. Frist was dogged, tracking down AARP executive William Novelli at home or on the road to trade ideas by cell phone on reforming Medicare. "I don't think they were used to that," Frist told TIME, noting that Republicans had traditionally seen the group as being too close to Democrats. "But I made it clear I needed them." It worked. AARP--which boasts 35 million members--threw its weight behind the G.O.P. overhaul.

At the same time that Frist has been poaching in Democratic territory, he has been careful to protect his flank with the G.O.P.'s hard-liners, who were worried at the outset that he was a closet moderate. Late last spring conservative and evangelical groups bluntly warned Frist that their activists would sit out next year's elections if they didn't see him cracking down on Democratic filibusters of conservative judges. "He got the message," says Free Congress Foundation chairman Paul Weyrich. Earlier this month Frist staged a 39-hour talkathon on the Senate floor to harangue the Democrats on the judges they blocked. The gabfest infuriated Daschle, who claimed Frist double-crossed him. Daschle had agreed to Frist's request to keep the Senate working through Veterans Day so it would have more time to clear its usual backlog. Only later did he learn that Frist also planned to use the week's extra time for a Republican telethon to promote conservative justices. Daschle dismissed it as a "colossal waste of time"--the judges remained blocked--and Democratic whip Harry Reid accused Frist of "amateur leadership." Many Republican Senators privately admitted that "it was a mindless walk into a cul-de-sac," as one put it, "designed to appeal to the 20% of our base that listens to Rush Limbaugh every day." Still, Frist had done what he set out to do: appease the restless troops on the right.