WASHINGTON — A few years ago, when President Bush announced plans to dump nuclear waste in Sen. Harry Reid's state, it was a political insult so stinging that the Nevada Democrat responded by calling the nation's commander in chief a liar.
Now Reid, the new Senate majority leader, is getting the red-carpet treatment. The administration treated Reid to two military plane rides in one week. He was invited to an intimate White House party, where Bush politely asked what books Reid had been reading lately.
The contrast is a measure of how the deeply ingrained habits of partisan vitriol are being tested -- and may be starting to break down -- as control of Congress changes hands. After Republicans' resounding defeat in the fall election, Bush and his lieutenants are paying attention to Democratic power brokers they had all but ignored for years.
The new speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, got a Christmas Day phone call from Bush at home in San Francisco. New committee chairmen are enjoying quality face time with Cabinet bigwigs. Even potential White House allies from the Democrats' conservative wing had been ignored for the last six years, but are now being ushered into the Oval Office.
Those gestures and other bows to bipartisanship are signs that the swearing-in of the new Congress is not just a fresh start for Democrats; it is the end of an era for Bush, who has had the luxury of governing for most of the last six years with his own party in charge of Congress.
New reality
Now Bush will have to burnish rusty skills at working across the political aisle. And he is facing partners in government who view him with deep suspicion and have relationships with the White House that range from frigid to nonexistent.
"We hope that when the president says compromise, it means more than 'do it my way,' which is what he's meant in the past," Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, a member of the Democratic leadership, said Wednesday after Bush made a Rose Garden statement calling for an effort to find "common ground."
Bipartisan agreement will surely be hard to find on some of the most difficult issues facing the nation, such as proposals to increase U.S. troop levels in Iraq, shore up the finances of Social Security or balance the federal budget.
But on other, narrower issues, such as overhauling immigration law and cracking down on pork barrel spending, Bush and Democrats in Congress may be able to make common cause.
