Bush's Relations With Capitol Hill Chilly

Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who was also on the trip, said Bush and Rangel seemed to get along famously, with Rangel giving the president a block-by-block account of Harlem's history as they rode through his district. Rangel said he did not discuss business with Bush, but still he helped broker a trade deal with the administration last week.

White House officials acknowledge that they are trying to make up for lost time with Democrats and are looking for any angle, however unconventional. When Rep. John P. Murtha Jr. (D-Pa.), among the most prominent and outspoken Democratic war critics, showed up at a recent meeting with national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, Cheney stopped by. The two men had worked closely during the Persian Gulf War, when Cheney was secretary of defense and Murtha was the top House Democrat on defense spending issues. Cheney seemed to want to question Murtha on what the Democrats were planning with the then-upcoming vote on war funding.

"I just told them where I was, what I was going to try to do, how I felt about the war -- that I didn't think we could win it," Murtha said in an interview, adding that he told Cheney that House Democrats would pass a tough spending bill with benchmarks and conditions on the war. "I don't think he believed we were going to pass the legislation."

For all the outreach, administration officials find it hard to disguise their frustrations over the new realities on Capitol Hill, sniping at Reid privately for his evolving positions on war funding and complaining about their inability to engage the House leadership in serious discussions on Iraq. After Bush vetoed the war spending bill that called for the gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, the president again invited congressional leaders to the White House, thinking they would begin negotiating a bill that both sides would find acceptable.

But according to several sources familiar with the meeting, Pelosi made it clear that House leaders would not engage in serious negotiations with the White House until after another bill passed and moved to a conference committee with the Senate.

During the conversation, the sources said, Hoyer asked the president whether Bolten spoke for him in negotiations, and Bush answered yes without hesitation, seeming to catch the Democrats by surprise. Bush then asked whether House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) spoke for Pelosi, and received what he and his aides regarded as an ambiguous answer. Bush seemed struck by that.

Within a matter of days -- and with no input from the administration -- House Democratic leaders began drafting a new bill, one the president said last week he would veto. White House officials said they learned details of the new measure from newspapers.

For now the White House efforts seem focused on the Senate, with Bolten holding tightly guarded conversations with Reid and GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), probing to see whether there is any common ground on a bill that would fund the war.

Reid said last week that his discussions with officials around the president suggest they "recognize there are some problems" but Bush himself appears isolated. "We talk to each other," he said. "I have no animosity toward the president. I look forward to when he's out of office, maybe going to a ballgame or something."

Staff writers Jonathan Weisman, Shailagh Murray and Peter Baker contributed to this report.