5 New Rules Of The Road

When George W. Bush finally pulled his presidency from the Florida swamp, the predictions were dire. Bush would be a man without a mandate, unable to move his agenda through the divided Senate. His plan to use Texas charm to win friends and influence lawmakers was dismissed as laughable, a rube's view of the capital.

Bush has always enjoyed proving the naysayers wrong. And in his first week on the job, he set about doing just that. He invited 90 lawmakers to the White House for meetings that--to their astonishment, after eight years on Clinton time--were tightly managed sessions that began and ended promptly. He doled out nicknames; by his fourth encounter with the gruff, 6-ft. 4-in. California Congressman George Miller, a potential adversary on education, Miller was answering to "Big George"--and Bush was explaining to other lawmakers that "the bilingual among us call him Jorge Grande."

El Presidente even worked his magic on Senators who had been gunning for his most conservative Cabinet nominees. "You know your way around here," he told one of his first guests for coffee in the Oval Office. "Recognize the desk?" And indeed, Edward Kennedy did--it had been his brother's. When Kennedy reached the microphones after the meeting, he was full of praise for Bush's new education plan. They still had their differences over giving vouchers to parents who want to take their children out of failing public schools, Kennedy said, "but I can't emphasize enough the other areas where the President was reaching out." Said an aide to House minority leader Dick Gephardt: "You can't help but like him."

The charm offensive was working just the way Bush had planned it back when the skeptics were making their predictions. "Washington was saying, 'That may have worked in Texas, but it won't work in Washington,'" says Bush adviser Mark McKinnon. "There is nothing he likes to hear more than you can't do something, because it just charges him up to prove that he can."

Bush aides were calling it a dream first week--even before Thursday, when Bush's big across-the-board tax cut got a huge boost from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. The Fed chief, who was the first village elder Bush went to see on his initial trip to Washington as President-elect, put forward last week the mind-bending idea that it was actually possible to pay off the national debt too fast. He told Congress that some sort of tax cut might do "noticeable good" if the economy keeps heading south.