Bush Shows He Can Turn on a Dime

Ever since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush has governed largely from the right, challenging the Democrats to support his proposals on terrorism and other matters -- or risk retribution at the polls. Until yesterday, he has thrived politically, defying predictions that the GOP would lose seats in the 2002 midterms and securing his own reelection two years later by a tremendous drive to galvanize grassroots Republican voters.

The strategy came up short for the first time yesterday, as Democrats picked up more than two dozen House seats, gaining the majority for the first time in 12 years, and seemed close to securing control of the Senate. Voters seemed to ignore the president's explicit warning that they would risk the country's safety and economic prosperity by giving power to the Democrats.

Now Bush must govern without his base in the House, which has been the driving force for much of his agenda on Medicare, energy, terrorism and taxes: GOP leaders had muscled through one Bush proposal after another, often with only a handful of votes to spare.

As former Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan demonstrated, split government can be an opportunity for a clever president: Clinton successfully used then-GOP speaker Newt Gingrich as a foil to present himself as a centrist, while he also secured a major overhaul of the welfare system and a balanced-budget agreement that was seen as keeping the economic prosperity of the 1990s going. Reagan achieved the last major overhaul of the tax code working with a Democratic House in 1986.

And while Democrats don't necessarily like to admit it, Bush does have a pre-9/11 track record -- both as Texas governor and in his first year as president -- of reaching across the aisle for agreements on education and taxes. He has spoken of his desire to launch a new bi-partisan effort to rein in the costs of Social Security and Medicare, and he has deputized his new Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., to sound out Hill Democrats about this possibility.

But as of this morning, it remained uncertain whether Bush would fully embrace this model -- and whether he could even be successful were he to try. White House aides have been privately frank in their frustration over what they see as relentless obstructionism by congressional Democrats, who in turn see the president as not sincere in his overtures.

The mid-term election campaigns may have only exacerbated this divide. In the last days of the campaign, Bush repeatedly cast sharp aspersions on the very proposition that the opposition can govern responsibly -- suggesting at one point that terrorists would "win" if Democratic policies were put in place -- and Democrats have used their own harsh rhetoric to characterize the president. Bush may ultimately decide that the best course would be to govern aggressively from the right, as some in his party advocate, accept that little would get done legislatively -- and set up contrasts for the party's presidential nominee to exploit in 2008.

Democrats will have their own internal debates to resolve. The party's liberal base is hungry to extract retribution from a president many believe has governed lawlessly and incompetently, yet the Democrats' electoral success yesterday hinged at least partly on the ability to make some inroads with more moderate, even conservative, candidates. Many Democratic lawmakers have signed on to a vague plan for a phased withdrawal from Iraq, but the party remains divided between a base eager to get out soon and a foreign policy establishment that sees a precipitous withdrawal as potentially damaging to both the country's and the party's interests.

One thing that seems certain is that the leadership of the Democratic Party sees value in trying to present a moderate image to voters, at least for now. In their comments last night and this morning, party leaders made clear that they have studied and learned from what they see as the bitter lessons that flowed from Republican over-reaching following the GOP's smashing victories in the 1994 mid-term elections.

Virtually every comment from party leaders suggested a belief that Americans are tired of partisan bickering. "We extend our hand of friendship, fellowship and partnership to the Republicans," Senate Democratic leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) told a victory rally last night. "The only way we can accomplish anything in the Congress is by working in a bipartisan basis."

Whether he and other leading Democrats truly believe in this approach after years of partisan warfare -- and whether President Bush grasps an extended hand -- will be the story of Washington for the next several months.