Bush's Cool Operator

Monday, Dec. 01, 2003 By DOUGLAS WALLER AND MATTHEW COOPER
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Frist, who was Bush's favorite candidate to replace Lott, has made rookie mistakes in his first year as majority leader. That may not be too surprising for a man who ascended to the post after being in the Senate for only eight years, having spent his career as a surgeon and then earning millions of dollars from HCA Inc., a hospital chain his father and brother founded. Last April Frist publicly agreed to a tax-cut package that was $200 billion less than what House Republican leaders wanted. House Speaker Dennis Hastert was furious, and Frist spent weeks healing the rift. Republican Senators trying to push the initial energy bill through the Senate last June publicly griped that they couldn't build momentum behind the measure because Frist kept pulling it from the floor to deal with other legislation. Even Senators who are part of Frist's leadership team were irked earlier this month when he slipped up and allowed the $87 billion spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan to pass without a roll-call vote. It let off the hook Democrats who didn't want to be seen as voting against the troops.

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At the same time, Frist's hardball tactics--shutting out Democratic lawmakers, springing important bills just before arraignment and counting on exhausted opponents to give up--may come back to haunt him. For one thing, cooperation from angry Democrats may be even harder to secure now on complex measures like the $31 billion energy bill, which was snarled in the Senate last week because of disputes over ethanol subsidies and liability protection for makers of gasoline additives. "The environment in the Senate is as poisonous as I've ever seen," says a worried Republican Senator.

But farther down Pennsylvania Avenue, at the White House, the President sees Fristy--his nickname for the doctor--as not just an ally in the Senate but also a key player in his 2004 campaign. "It's a lot easier running for re-election after having passed a major Medicare reform," a presidential adviser says. The President, who never warmed to the independent-minded Lott, began his alliance with Frist during the 2000 campaign, when Bush tapped him to be a liaison to the Senate. Since then, Frist has cultivated the President too and hunted with Dick Cheney and top adviser Karl Rove. "He wants the President to like him," says a White House insider. "You can tell."

For his part, Frist says, "my leadership style is pretty simple: define a mission, be able to write it on a single card in a single sentence." The kindly exterior has always masked his aggressive nature. Heart-transplant surgeons are like that. "They are people who are disciplined, are focused, are no-nonsense," Frist says. "The timid people in medicine don't go into the field of cutting hearts out and putting them in." Tom Daschle would surely agree.