Hey, Big Spender ...

The White House's Roosevelt Room is wired for PowerPoint presentations, and most officials also bring handouts when they brief George W. Bush and his inner circle. But Budget Director Josh Bolten, who has spent months walking the President through a problem that could dramatically affect his legacy, sticks to colorful charts on old-fashioned easels. The lights stay on, so nobody dozes off, and there's no paper to wander through. It's dense material, after all. "I keep everyone's attention focused on what I want them to focus on," Bolten said.

The President will need all the colorful charts he can muster. After five years of tax cuts and massive spending that brought back deficits and ensured that they will continue for years if not decades, Bush plans to use his State of the Union address on Jan. 31 to portray himself as, well, thrifty. He will talk about the need to rein in programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and he'll tout the modest budget cuts that Congress passed at his request last year. His staff wants to make "restraining spending" a defining Bush characteristic, along with spreading democracy around the world and prosecuting the war on terrorism.

Why the change of heart? Bush has always shared the conservative aversion to big government programs, his aides insist. There are also short-term political points at stake. The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal makes this an ideal time to go after what are known as earmarks--that is, spending placed in legislation, often without public review, for specific projects. That pork is a mainstay of the lobbying industry. And there is little money to spend anyway, so Bush might as well retool himself as a fearless budget cop. "Listen, we got a lot of people in Washington who preach fiscal discipline, and then they go on to vote against spending restraint," Bush told the Economic Club of Chicago just after New Year's.

But Bush himself has a huge credibility problem. The $236 billion Clinton surplus of 2000 has become a $400 billion annual deficit. Setting aside Social Security, about a quarter of what the government has spent since Bush became President has been borrowed. And estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show that if his tax cuts are made permanent--as he is advocating--deficits will persist for at least 10 years.

Even Bush's supporters criticize his lack of fiscal restraint. They look with dismay at figures showing that the federal workforce of about 2.7 million is roughly the same size it was at the beginning of President Bill Clinton's second term. And they point out that Bush has not vetoed a single bill since taking office. "It's hard to veto something from a Congress dominated by your own party," says Murray Weidenbaum, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Ronald Reagan, "but Bush should have been tougher on the spending side. That's been a disappointment."