Word: frist
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...Shut out of the room, a hapless Daschle tried to play an outside game-rallying seniors against the measure. But Frist outfoxed him. He began huddling privately with top AARP officials last December and held some 15 meetings with them over the next 11 months. Frist was dogged, tracking down aarp executive William Novelli at home or on the road to trade ideas by cell phone on reforming Medicare. "I don't think they were used to that," Frist told Time, noting that Republicans had traditionally seen the group as being too close to Democrats. "But I made it clear...
...same time that Frist has been poaching in Democratic territory, he has been careful to protect his flank with the G.O.P's hard-liners, who were worried at the outset that he was a closet moderate. Late last spring conservative and evangelical groups bluntly warned Frist that their activists would sit out next year's elections if they didn't see him cracking down on Democratic filibusters of conservative judges. "He got the message," says Free Congress Foundation chairman Paul Weyrich. Earlier this month Frist staged a 39-hour talkathon on the Senate floor to harangue the Democrats...
...Frist, who was Bush's favorite candidate to replace Lott, has made rookie mistakes in his first year as majority leader. That may not be too surprising for a man who ascended to the post after being in the Senate for only eight years, having spent his career as a surgeon and then earning millions of dollars from HCA Inc., a hospital chain his father and brother founded. Last April Frist publicly agreed to a tax-cut package that was $200 billion less than what House Republican leaders wanted. House Speaker Dennis Hastert was furious, and Frist spent weeks healing...
...same time, Frist's hardball tactics-shutting out Democratic lawmakers, springing important bills just before arraignment and counting on exhausted opponents to give up-may come back to haunt him. For one thing, cooperation from angry Democrats may be even harder to secure now on complex measures like the $31 billion energy bill, which was snarled in the Senate last week because of disputes over ethanol subsidies and liability protection for makers of gasoline additives. "The environment in the Senate is as poisonous as I've ever seen," says a worried Republican Senator...
...just an ally in the Senate but also a key player in his 2004 campaign. "It's a lot easier running for re-election after having passed a major Medicare reform," a presidential adviser says. The President, who never warmed to the independent-minded Lott, began his alliance with Frist during the 2000 campaign, when Bush tapped him to be a liaison to the Senate. Since then, Frist has cultivated the President too and hunted with Dick Cheney and top adviser Karl Rove. "He wants the President to like him," says a White House insider. "You can tell...