It was the morning after Congress took a big step toward giving President Bush much of his proposed tax cut, but the plan's primary architect, Lawrence Lindsey, the chief White House economic policy adviser, already had other things on his mind.
The commission appointed by Bush to develop a plan for private investment accounts in Social Security needed office space, background material and a schedule, Lindsey was told at his daily staff meeting on the second floor of the West Wing.
Other issues followed in quick succession: Delta Air Lines seemed headed toward a showdown with striking pilots at its Comair subsidiary. And the leading industrial nations were establishing a task force to study how to give low-income people better access to computers.
A few minutes later, Lindsey headed into a meeting on the administration's policy toward government-chartered, shareholder-owned corporations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a topic of intense interest to Wall Street, the mortgage industry and financial regulators. That afternoon, he went downstairs to the Oval Office, to brief the president on energy policy, then to a meeting about overhauling Medicare.
Having watched his father lose the presidency in part because of how he handled the recession of the early 1990s, Bush has kept economic issues front and center in his administration. And that has put a particular focus -- and onus -- on Lindsey and the rest of Bush's team of economic advisers, including the Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, and the budget director, Mitchell Daniels Jr.
The president came to office with an agenda full of proposals to reshape economic policy along conservative lines: cutting taxes, restraining government spending, giving people the chance to invest their Social Security money, expanding free trade, reducing regulation.
To the president's ideological opponents, the team's approach is fiscally irresponsible, a payoff to its corporate patrons and an effort to repackage right-wing policies in a centrist guise.
But even some of the administration's harshest critics say they have been impressed by the discipline and political touch that the president and his team have brought to pursuing their agenda, especially the tax cut.
They say the team has been particularly nimble in turning events to its favor.
When the economy turned downward, Bush's tax plan, originally presented as a way to send the federal budget surplus back to taxpayers, became an antirecession program. When gasoline prices surged, the tax cut became a subsidy to help consumers cope with rising energy costs. And Bush's support for more oil and gas drilling became the solution to the rolling blackouts afflicting California.
It is a team heavy on corporate and Washington experience, with a strong ideological bent but no close ties to the epicenter of the market economy, Wall Street.
While it has championed free markets and sought to portray itself as above special-interest politics, it has proved willing to pursue a limited industrial policy in some cases, as in its support for shielding operators of nuclear power plants from liability or in providing government subsidies for clean-coal technology. And while many of its members came to office espousing a policy of blocking international bailouts of countries that get into financial trouble, the Bush team has already backed new International Monetary Fund loans to one strategically important ally, Turkey, and is supporting a package being negotiated by another economically struggling nation, Argentina.
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