Round One to Bush

...The effect may be to put more pro-Bush pressure on the Senate...

...Let's assume Bush loses two or three Republicans, a pessimistic assumption...

...Republican leaders dutifully credit Bush for achieving such amazing GOP unity...

...BY FRED BARNES ON THE EVENING before the vote in the House on the most important part of his most important initiative—the $1.6 trillion tax cut—President Bush watched a movie...

...Bush has a good chance of accomplishing this, too, but he'll need to work harder than he did in the House...

...Still, another Democrat may have to be plucked from a list of potentials that includes Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Max Cleland of Georgia, Max Baucus of Montana, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas...

...To keep up the momentum, says senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the president "should spend very little time in Washington over the next few months and continue selling, selling, selling...

...We'll see...

...More than one," a Bush adviser says...

...That was to representative Connie Morella of Maryland, probably the most liberal Republican in Congress...

...Chairman Charles Grassley of the Finance Committee needs two of them just to get the Bush bill to the Senate floor...

...She was persuaded and joined every other Republican in the House—and 10 Democrats—in voting for the cuts...

...In 1981, President Reagan had to shrink the first phase of his tax rate cut from 10 percent to 5 percent...

...The buzz in Washington is that Bush will have to compromise substantially to get a reasonable facsimile of his tax cut through the Senate...

...Bush has been helped, Blunt adds, by the economic downturn and the near endorsement of his tax bill by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan...

...That means he needs five more votes, plus the tiebreaker of Vice President Dick Cheney...

...He invited leaders of Jewish organizations and Jewish members of Congress to join him in the 40-seat White House theater for a screening of Varian's War...

...McCain...

...But Reagan was left with a tax bill close to what he wanted...

...Later, of course, on the floor or in a Senate-House conference on taxes, the trigger could be dropped...

...Republicans had been surprised several days before the vote when they polled GOP House members and found no one determined to vote against the rate cuts...

...The toughest is senator Olympia Snowe of Maine...

...Bush already has Miller and will need one or two more...

...The subject of taxes never came up...

...Bush has a hole card with Snowe: his father...

...On each of these bills, several dozen Democrats are expected to vote with Republicans...

...The president has done Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...He'll need only two or three Senate Democrats to get to 50...

...True, the Senate, tied 5050, will be tougher than the House...

...That leaves Lincoln Chafee of Rhode island...

...The other Republican, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, could be enticed with a promise of favors on other issues...

...Senate Republicans insist they have a mystery senator who has privately committed to vote for Bush's bill...

...Who knows whether he'll feel obligated to back the first major piece of legislation of the man who beat him for the Republican presidential nomination...

...No doubt Bush will have to shave some of the sharp edges off his tax cut to gain Senate passage...

...After last week's movie event, Bush sent his guests on a tour of the White House, while he went to bed early, a luxury he may have to give up when crunch time arrives for his tax cut in the Senate...

...By the time the Senate acts this spring, the House may have passed, on separate votes, a doubling of the child tax credit, elimination of the federal estate tax, and a more generous method of nullifying the marriage penalty than the president proposed...

...a great job" in promoting his tax cut, says the deputy Republican whip, representative Roy Blunt of Missouri...

...Former president Bush, as a part-time resident of Kennebunkport, Maine, is a friend of Snowe and may be enlisted to lobby her...

...Where will he get them...

...So Bush starts out with 44 Republicans and one Democrat, Zell Miller of Georgia...

...My money is on Torricelli or Nelson...

...GOP leaders think Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania would be wary of being either the lone senator to abandon Bush or part of a renegade duo...

...The president's insouciance was vindicated...

...The movie is about Varian Fry, an American who engineered the escape of Jewish artists and intellectuals from Vichy France in World War ii...

...To satisfy her, Grassley may have to add a "trigger" limiting the tax cut should debt payments fall short...

...And the five Senate GOP moderates who have balked at the Bush measure for one reason or another have considerably more leverage than House moderates...

...He's an enigma...

...That is exactly what Bush intends to do...

...Bush made a handful of calls to Capitol Hill, but only one mattered...

...Maybe not...

...He won't need the 60 votes required to block a filibuster because the tax cut will be handled as part of budget reconciliation, a process that bars filibusters...

...Then there's senator John McCain of Arizona, who conspicuously has not lined up with Bush...

...Some Republican officials believe there's no way to win him over...

...Bush hung around for an hour afterwards, chatting...

...Bush sat with Lionel Chetwynd, the movie's director and one of Hollywood's few conservatives and Bush supporters...

...And if Snowe signs on, that will make it easy for Susan Collins, the other Maine senator, to join up...

...Let's start with the dissident Republicans...

...The next day, he barely lifted a finger to win passage, 230198, of across-the-board reductions in tax rates on individual income, the largest and most contentious element of his tax bill...

...Or Snowe might settle for a non-binding Senate resolution urging a trigger...