Dressed in a blue blazer and an open-necked shirt, Bayh, who is handsome in an old-fashioned sitcom-dad way without being charismatic, declared to 150 activists at a Democratic rally here, “I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am to be here in Floyd County rather than Washington, D.C. The gulf between our nation’s capital and the people of our state and country has never been greater. Back there, it is constant gridlock, sniping partisanship and, I regret to say, too much corruption. In 12 short days, we have a chance to change all that by electing Baron Hill as our next congressman.”

On the stump in Indiana, Bayh is friendly but not folksy, eagerly acknowledging half a dozen people in every audience (nods of recognition that may date from the reelection campaigns of his father, Sen. Birch Bayh) but never resorting to any of those heavy-handed ruralisms that were part of Al Gore’s political repertoire. Bayh comes across in public like what he probably is in private — a nice guy who has served two terms as governor and eight years in the U.S. Senate without letting his internal sense of self-importance swell to John Kerry-esque levels.

This trip with Bayh offered one of the last glimpses of the would-be presidential contender campaigning in his natural habitat. While he is not on the ballot this year, Bayh was investing his prestige, as the dominant Democrat in the state, in helping Hill and Ellsworth win House seats in a state that George W. Bush carried with 60 percent of the vote in 2004. (Bayh has also lent his luster to the strong Democratic House challenger in northern Indiana’s second district, Joe Donnelly.) But judging from polls and political spending, Hill and Ellsworth were already well on their way. What is happening in these two southern Indiana districts is the same thing that is happening all along the Ohio River, where a solid swatch of Republican congressional territory in three states, Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, is poised to go blue. The Democratic tide here and in the Northeast may be strong enough in and of itself to provide the 15 seats needed for the House to change control.

Until recently, through no fault of his own, Bayh had been a stealth presidential contender. The political press corps had crowned Mark Warner and Barack Obama as the “Hot New Faces of ’06.” But then early this month, former Virginia Gov. Warner made the stunning announcement that he would rather live a normal life than spend the next two years winning hearts and minds in Iowa. Suddenly, Bayh, another former red-state governor and political moderate, stepped out of the chorus to audition for what was supposed to be Warner’s role as the alternative to Hillary Clinton.

Bayh’s speeches were all part of that ongoing rhetorical experiment to create a stump speech that will inspire Iowa and nurture New Hampshire. A politician hones his stump speech the same way that a stand-up comic perfects his act — through constant repetition and a close reading of audience reaction.

At a Democratic Party dinner in Clarksville Thursday night, Bayh pumped his right fist like a metronome as he declared, “We have had too much of the toxic politics of Washington, D.C., too much of the divide and conquer, too much of the appeal to people’s baser instincts rather than their highest aspirations… The road to national greatness does not lie down the path of least resistance.”

At this stage of the still inchoate presidential campaign, candidates are searching for that magic-bullet phrase, like Bill Clinton’s constant talk about Americans “who work hard and play by the rules,” or Bush’s 2000 “compassionate conservatism.” Never underestimate the potency of such political catchphrases. Jimmy Carter created a presidency out of his smiling promise to give American “a government as good as its people.”

So it is with Bayh and “national greatness,” a phrase that he dropped into virtually every Indiana speech. When I sat down with Bayh for an interview at Baron Hill’s campaign headquarters in Jeffersonville, he freely acknowledged the importance of big themes rather than small-bore positions in erecting the framework for a presidential campaign. “You’ve got to have your positions well thought out and they have to add up,” he said. “But that’s not the most important thing … I think it’s about a greater sense of unity and togetherness. I think it’s about a renewed sense of American idealism. And I think all this boils down to a commitment to renewed national greatness.”

Talking about a presidential race, Bayh displayed the virtual certainty of a candidate who has moved beyond “maybes” and “ifs.” As he put it to me, “You have to be able to look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m prepared to do this.’ Your family has to be supportive. And then the final step is to do all the practical things like raising money and building an organization. We’re on those things, particularly in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

In fact, in his appearances across Indiana, Bayh expressed an impatience with his current job that would be impolitic for a senator planning on running for reelection. “I loved being governor because you’re making decisions, you’re responsible for getting things done,” he said in Clarksville. “Too often things in Washington are about giving speeches and casting symbolic votes.”

While I was traveling with Bayh to get a sense of how his act might translate when it goes national, I was equally intrigued that three GOP-held House seats are in play in a state that has elected few Democrats not named Bayh to high office. “Indiana is kind of a microcosm of the larger story of this country,” said James McCann, a political science professor at Purdue University. “There’s Iraq, and Indiana has taken its share of hits. The economic decline across the industrial belt, you get that in Indiana too. And you also see increased competitiveness and a higher quality of candidates on the part of the Democrats this year.”

Bayh made a similar point when I asked him to explain the Democratic resurgence in Indiana. “We’re not easily caricatured here in Indiana,” he said. “We’re for strong national security, we’re for fiscal discipline and we represent the broad center of the country, not only geographically, but perhaps in ideological terms too. It’s not easy for the Republicans’ slice-and-dice-and-demonize techniques to work on a Brad Ellsworth, a Joe Donnelly or a Baron Hill.”

The silver-haired Hill — a former congressman trying to win back his seat after being upended by Mike Sodrel in 2004 — has been running hard on the corruption issue, airing an ad highlighting campaign contributions that his opponent received from Tom DeLay and jailed GOP Rep. Duke Cunningham. At a party rally in New Albany, Hill played the populist card as he rattled off a list of Republican reprobates. He began with Cunningham, then moved on to Ohio’s Bob Ney and Tom DeLay of Texas and ended with Jack Abramoff. “There’s an abuse of power going on in Washington, D.C.,” Hill thundered, “and it needs to be changed.”

In the adjoining 8th District, Brad Ellsworth, the Vanderburgh County sheriff, is running a strong race without framing the contest in aggressively partisan terms. His opponent is John Hostettler, a socially conservative Republican who has represented this district along the Illinois border since the 1994 Newt Gingrich landslide. Ellsworth, who is probably the closest thing the Democrats have this year to Gary Cooper in “High Noon,” comes across as a concerned local sheriff who happens, by chance, to be a Democrat. While other candidates fricassee Bush, Ellsworth said in an interview, “There’s not many Democrats who will say this, but I want our president, regardless of party, to be strong.”

Of course, Ellsworth has the benefit of a flaky opponent, since Hostettler was caught in 2004 trying to bring a loaded gun through airport security in Louisville. Hostettler is also one of the rare House Republicans who voted against the Iraq war, a decision that he is trumpeting in a TV spot. But the distinctive ad in this southern Indiana race is a Hostettler radio spot that warns that, if elected, Ellsworth will vote for “San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi … who will then put in motion her radical plan to advance the homosexual agenda led by Barney Frank, reprimanded by the House after paying for sex with a man who ran a gay brothel out of Congressman Frank’s home.” What an odd combination: a gay-baiting, antiwar Republican.

It is strange that Hostettler voted against the war, but Indiana’s leading Democrat stoutly supported the invasion of Iraq. That 2002 vote haunts Bayh and complicates his efforts to appeal to the activist base of the Democratic Party. “I wouldn’t cast that vote knowing what I know today,” he told me. But while other leading 2008 contenders like John Kerry and John Edwards have loudly repudiated their Iraq votes, Bayh has not totally abandoned his hawkish plumage, even though he called for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation in 2004 and publicly stated over the summer that we need to develop a withdrawal plan from Iraq. If he hopes to win the allegiance of the antiwar netroots in 2008, Bayh holds few face cards.

But what he offers the Democrats’ activist base is a surprisingly potent sadder-but-wiser argument. “I’ve learned,” he said ruefully. “I’m someone who is going to demand a higher level of proof and be more skeptical in asking questions.” Talking about his current service on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bayh added, “I’m a lot more skeptical these days, asking, ‘How reliable is that information? What don’t we know out there? How certain are you?’”

As a presidential candidate, Bayh would understand places like southern Indiana where Democrats prosper only by skirting divisive social issues and avoiding vitriolic attacks on Bush. That awareness of what it takes to win an electoral majority can be a strength in the general election and a fatal weakness in Democratic primaries.

During our interview, I asked Bayh whether he was envious of the Obama mania that is sweeping the country. Bayh has the longer résumé; Obama is on the cover of Time magazine. Bayh paused for a second before admitting the obvious. “I’m only human,” he conceded, then added, in a deliberately light tone, “but I’ve decided to save all that for a year from now. You don’t want to peak too soon.”

Then Bayh alluded to the cyclical nature of the 18-month race for the presidential nomination when he said, “Popularity ebbs and flows,” he said. “This process has a cycle and a flow to it … [Voters] will have infatuations here and infatuations there. Ultimately, what they’ll want is someone who can lead the country during incredibly challenging times.”

It was a comment simultaneously wise and wan. Bayh sounded like the earnest Midwestern suitor who hopes that the object of his affections will get over the glitz and glamour and recognize his superior virtue and experience. With Warner out of the race, there is an opening for Bayh. The question is whether this red-state senator will find the stirring words and the uplifting music to take advantage of his moment.

McCain’s no-nukes-nohow position flows naturally from his promise of “rogue-state rollback” in his 2000 race for the White House. But Bayh’s stance symbolizes something simultaneously politically intriguing and potentially dangerous for the out-of-power party. For suddenly the Democrats see in Tehran’s ill-concealed quest for nuclear weapons an issue that allows them to boast, “I ran to Bush’s right on national security.”

As we talked about Iran over lunch, Bayh took pains to underscore his “awareness that the use of force is not a panacea and there will be adverse consequences to that as well.” But the two-term senator and former governor also stressed, “We’re talking about nuclear weapons in the hands of a state that aids and abets terrorism, with an apocalyptic and unstable leader who is also deeply hostile to us.” Bayh may have been picturing what it might be like to sit in the Oval Office weighing conflicting recommendations about how to forestall a nuclear-armed ayatollah when he said with a sigh, “It’s going to be a tough one.”

Bayh may be a bit more open than other Democrats about discussing the implications of militarily confronting Iran, but he is far from alone in his get-tough stance. The always-square-in-the-middle-of-the-road Sen. Clinton declared in a foreign-policy address at Princeton last month, “We cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran — that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons.” It is easy to draw such lines in the dust three years before any Democratic president would be forced to act on them, but there is also a risk that such threats may ultimately sound as hollow as demanding Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.”

Just as Iraq was always a neoconservative obsession, Democrats can easily get caught up in an I-told-you-so single-mindedness about Iran. Even early Iraq war critics like Howard Dean always took pains to ridicule the president for ignoring the threat from the other two charter members of the Axis of Evil. With the administration only now belatedly remembering that Iraq is not the only four-letter-word country in the region — and still looking to, yes, Old Europe for leadership on the nuclear issue — it is easy for Democrats to ridicule the spineless diplomacy of Condi Rice.

Democrats like Bayh can find support for their unyielding approach to Tehran from some foreign-policy veterans in the party. Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security advisor, told me in an interview, “There are a lot of downsides to force, but you can’t eliminate it as an option because we can’t tolerate a nuclear Iran.” Tipping his hat to Bayh, Berger said, “I think this is a situation where Evan’s hawkishness serves him well.”

At a time when former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner is winning the new-face-in-town buzz as a presidential prospect, Bayh advanced himself in the 2008 mix with a Feb. 2 appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Normally, a Democratic senator giving a luncheon global-affairs address at a D.C. think tank is an opportunity for graduate research into adult sleep patterns. But Bayh pulled off a feat as unlikely as C-SPAN sponsoring a wet T-shirt contest by delivering a foreign-policy talk that people other than Senate staffers actually noticed. It was here that Bayh attracted attention by demanding U.N. economic and political sanctions against Iran — and pointedly adding, “If its nuclear activities persist, there will be consequences beyond that, including the use of force.”

Bayh is a moderate in both ideology and style, but something about this Feb. 2 speech caught the wave. Maybe it was Bayh’s in-your-face challenge to Karl Rove’s claim that the Democrats were weak on national security or the senator’s muscular language — “This administration has undermined the nation’s security and bungled the war on terror.” The New York Times highlighted Bayh’s critique in its monthly installment of that journalistic evergreen: Whither the Democrats? Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who circulated excerpts to all his Democratic colleagues, went out of his way to praise Bayh’s speech last Friday in a meeting with left-liberal reporters.

There is an understandable hunger in the Democratic Party for a national-security issue that makes the Bush administration look like incompetent wimps. Small wonder that Berger views Iran as that rare situation “where good policy and good politics converge.” But, in truth, there is also the awkward reality that threatening military action against Iran only works if Tehran believes the bluster. As Ivo Daalder, a Clinton national security staffer now at the Brookings Institution, put it, “I’m a pretty hawkish person, but I don’t think there is a military option with Iran.”

Sen. Joe Biden, another potential Democratic presidential candidate, made a similar point about the limits of “military action” in an NPR interview last week. These days it is near heresy for any Democrat with national ambitions to applaud any aspect of Bush foreign policy. But Biden bravely abandoned the easy political road by also praising (yes, praising) the administration for recently switching to “the correct policy with regard to Iran,” which is a patient effort through diplomacy to develop an international consensus in favor of sanctions.

Ray Takeyh, an Iran policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, is skeptical about both military action and easy rhetoric that threatens it. As Takeyh points out, the Democrats have erred tragically in the past by trying to out-hawk the Republicans. “You’re replaying the JFK card,” he said. “In 1960, Kennedy tried to get to Nixon’s right on Cuba. The problem is that once Kennedy became president, he was locked into the Bay of Pigs invasion.”

Bayh, Clinton and the other all-options-on-the-table Democrats have not yet Krazy-glued themselves into any precipitous course such as, say, threatening airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. But in the 33 months (yes, we are already counting down) to the 2008 election, there will be many tempting opportunities for national-security Democrats to ratchet up their guns-blazing rhetoric on Iran. But the last thing the Democrats need — especially when so many of them proved so compliant for so long over Iraq — is to give way to I-ran-amok posturing in their quest for the White House.

That leaves countless organizations across the country that run programs in housing, education, healthcare, conservation and even homeland security — Bush’s Citizen Corps program is part of AmeriCorps — unsure of getting the volunteers they’re relying on to provide crucial services this year. And it has forced some AmeriCorps troops to choose between working for free or quitting.

The idealism of the AmeriCorps program has had broad bipartisan appeal, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. And the surprising news of its current trouble has frustrated elected officials in both parties.

Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., who in the wake of 9/11 joined Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain to cosponsor a 2001 bill that would have expanded the AmeriCorps program fivefold to 250,000 volunteers, fumed at the cutbacks — and at Bush’s failure to back up his promises. “Lip service is no substitute for expanding opportunities for national service,” Bayh told Salon in an interview. “The president needs to expend political capital to get this done.”

McCain, through a spokesman, echoed that complaint. “This administration’s commitment to expanding the AmeriCorps program has not been what it should be,” aide Marshall Whitman said in an interview. “Senator McCain believes that we should be expanding rather than limiting opportunities for young Americans to enlist in causes greater than their self-interest.”

Despite Bush’s promises to expand the program dramatically over last year’s $265 million, it encountered strong opposition among congressional conservatives who are usually allied with Bush. The House whip, Republican Dick Armey of Texas, who has called AmeriCorps “obnoxious,” and Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., added a measure to the budget bill last fall to cap the program at 50,000 volunteers — a direct slap at the president’s “compassionate” agenda.

Bush saw what was happening, critics say, but did nothing to stop it. Even last December, when the administration knew Congress had capped the number of volunteers at 50,000 in the budget bill, he was still claiming in speeches that the AmeriCorps program was “expanding mightily,” Bayh said.

The volunteers are “doing a lot to work to mentor and clean parks and take care of the elderly,” Bush said in a Dec. 10 talk to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. “Listen, part of making sure America is a compassionate place means acts as simple as walking into a shut-in’s home and saying ‘I love you’ on a regular basis.”

Bush signed the $275 million budget — which included the 50,000-volunteer limit — last month.

“With his tax-cut program coming up, the president has been unwilling to expend the political capital it would take to get the funding for this program,” said one congressional source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Then, in January, the office of Management and Budget delivered a devastating report. Auditors found that last year the agency in charge of AmeriCorps, the Corporation for National Service, had shifted money from a trust fund for the educational grants paid to each volunteer into an account that would pay the volunteers’ annual stipends. The OMB, which is run by the executive branch, accused AmeriCorps of using “Enron-like accounting” in its handling of the funds. To offset the improper transfer, the OMB said it was withdrawing $64 million of the current year’s AmeriCorps funding of $275 million in order to cover the trust-fund deficit from the prior year.

Full-time AmeriCorps volunteers receive a one-year stipend of up to $9,000 for living expenses. The trust fund was set up to pay out the $4,725 educational grants that each volunteer also earns for a year of service — grants that may be used for college expenses anytime within seven years following service in AmeriCorps. The loss of that $64 million leaves only enough funds to take on 28,000 volunteers this year, according to a study released Feb. 25 by the Progressive Policy Institute, based in Washington.

Marc Magee, author of the institute study, says of AmeriCorps’ financial difficulties: “In the end, we don’t know if the crisis is more about the strange and abiding enmity toward national service exhibited by conservative Republicans — an enmity so deep that normally subservient members of Congress are willing to defy their own president — or about the president’s refusal to expend an ounce of political capital to redeem his own rhetoric.”

Sandy Scott, a spokesman for the Corporation for National Service, said the agency is “not pointing any fingers” and says that while it is unlikely that Bush’s promise of an expanded AmeriCorps program would be honored, the number of volunteers taken on this year would eventually reach last year’s 50,000 level. He offered no clues as to where the funding would come from but said that the corporation is in talks with the Office of Management and Budget.

One possibility is that AmeriCorps might “borrow” from the trust fund once again, in effect fobbing off to the next Congress the responsibility for covering the promised educational-grant funds for this year’s volunteers. An OMB spokesman confirms that the idea of letting AmeriCorps shift funds around between stipends and the trust fund is “under review.”

Such a return to “Enron accounting” could upset both AmeriCorps supporters and the program’s critics in Congress, while raising doubts in the minds of AmeriCorps volunteers about whether the grants they earn will really be there when they try to claim them.

Meanwhile, countless organizations across the country that run social service programs are facing an uncertain future. Among the programs that heavily rely on AmeriCorp volunteers are Habitat for Humanity, Teach for America, and the National AIDS Fund. Ironically, the AmeriCorps crisis has especially hurt the reading readiness programs that Laura Bush has been actively promoting.

The president’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, had announced plans to almost double the number of volunteers in a program called Just Read, Florida! which was already placing 600 tutors in 203 of the state’s elementary schools in low-income areas. Gov. Bush’s plan to add another 500 tutors had to be shelved because of his brother’s failure to deliver on the promised expansion.

Meanwhile, also left wondering are thousands of young people who had been expecting to spend the year earning college money while doing a year of volunteer community service work. Many are college students who work part-time at projects like tutoring or mentoring, in return earning pro-rated education grants of between $900 and $2,700.

“This funding crisis has made the program lose credibility at the local level,” says Amy Gibans McGlashan, vice chairman of the Vermont AmeriCorps agency. “Some of our student volunteers who were working in mentoring programs in local schools and other activities have been told that the educational grants they thought they were earning would no longer be available. They ended up working for free. When promises like that are broken, it really hurts. We think it’s going to take a year or more to restore credibility in the program after that.”

“He shouldn’t be confirmed,” Kerrey says. “If this guy had been funded by the American Socialist party during the Reagan administration, and had attacked Ronald Reagan over and over and then a Democrat nominated him, the Republicans wouldn’t vote to confirm him.”

But Kerrey’s voice is probably the only one you hear criticizing the Olson nomination.

Some would use this as further evidence that the Democratic Party has gone AWOL. The perfect symbol for the Democratic Party’s impotence, they say, is the fevered, passive hope — what its members whisper about away from the TV cameras and NPR microphones — that the recently hospitalized Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., 98, might soon die, and be replaced with a Democratic senator by South Carolina’s Democratic governor.

“Obviously, it’s a hard time for Democrats,” says former Clinton domestic policy director Bruce Reed, who just became president of the Democratic Leadership Council. “We didn’t win the election and we don’t control the agenda. It remains to be seen how good we are at defense now that we’ve lost our goalie.”

“Bush is acting like he won 60 percent of the vote and 340 electoral votes on top of it,” Kerrey says. “He’s pressing way beyond his mandate.”

But who’s to stand in his way? “They’re trying to get their sea legs,” Kerrey says of his former colleagues.

To many liberals, the Democrats just seem like wimps — “Why the Democrats Are Getting Rolled,” reads the headline of the New Republic. The frontline reports are grim: A recent New York Times story reports: “Democrats said they felt all the more leaderless because of the lingering strains between Mr. Gore and Mr. Clinton, which have been heightened by the controversies over gifts and pardons.” The analyses are rude: “It’s been painful to watch the Democrats roll over and play dead for George W. Bush since his coronation,” reads an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor.

But while it’s clear that Bush’s first four weeks as president have gone fairly well (as first four weeks usually do), the notion that Bush is romping and the Democrats — now without control of the House, Senate or White House for the first time since Eisenhower — are taking a dive is a rather simplistic analysis and drives Democrats on the Hill crazy.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., is clearly irritated at any notion that Democrats are “getting rolled.” While media speculation had scores of Democrats jumping ship in droves, as in 1981, to support the Republican president’s tax cut, Frank says: “How many Democrats are in favor of his tax plan? One: Zell Miller, the accidental senator.” (Former Georgia Gov. Miller had retired from public life until Democrats begged him to serve as the replacement for the late Sen. Paul Coverdell, a Republican, who died last year.)

Frank begins rattling off a list: “Ashcroft was the bitterest fight, the most substantial opposition to block a Cabinet nomination since John Tower. … Dick Gephardt is in the middle of a big fight over election reform in the House.” Also, Bush is and will increasingly be on the defensive over the patients bill of rights and campaign finance reform, Frank assures.

“This whole notion that we’re not fighting him is journalistic bullshit,” Frank says.

Instead, what Democrats say is: We’re biding our time for the big battles — like, say, when Bush announces his budget next week.

But until then, they are clearly fumbling. The real question for the Democrats: What’s their choice?

They do have a convenient target to blame: the president and his legacy of outgoing blunders. (Kerrey says: “Every time you see [a Democrat] on the weekend shows, the first question is, ‘Do you think Clinton should have pardoned Marc Rich?’” Says Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.: “It’s a sizable diversion.”)

But there’s been internal confusion, as well. For instance, Frank says, a couple of weekends ago, at the Democratic Caucus retreat, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin spoke against the Bush tax cut. But Rubin told his fellow Democrats that he couldn’t do so publicly, since as a former secretary of the treasury he thought it inappropriate to intrude too politically into the matter.

Democrats objected to this; they wanted him out there slamming the tax cut. They pointed out that former Treasury Secretary James Baker III didn’t seem to have too many attacks of conscience when he was demagoguing on Bush’s behalf down in Tallahassee, warning of crashing markets and the pending apocalypse if Gore didn’t immediately concede. On Sunday, Feb. 11, Rubin’s op-ed, “A Prosperity Easy to Destroy,” appeared in the New York Times.

But one well-placed New York Times op-ed does not an effective message make, and Democratic opposition to the Bush tax cut has yet to gel. Even Frank allows that the Democrats are “trying to figure out what’s the best way to oppose the Republican tax plan.”

“There’s significant division on how to proceed,” Kerrey says. “There’s a split in the party as to whether Gore was too populist or not populist enough, instead of uniting around the idea that Gore really won the election and Bush is claiming a mandate he doesn’t have.” (Which is what Kerrey thinks they should be doing.)

“At the moment, there’s not a single, coherent message,” groused an executive at a leading liberal political action committee last week. “Which is what Bush has done so brilliantly. We, on the other hand, have different kinds of objections, different kinds of alternate proposals.” On Feb. 7, he says, the liberal “Progressive Caucus” held a press conference to denounce the Bush tax cut, and each of the half-dozen speakers from the liberal wings of the House and Senate had his or her own specific idea and criticism. “There is a bit of a vacuum in terms of coherent message and message discipline,” says this executive. “And Bush has both of those in spades.”

But even when the Democrats do speak in one voice, the Democrats’ press conferences have had limited effect. The press conference against the Bush tax cut proposal held two weeks ago, for instance, by the designated congressional leaders of the party — Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and House Minority Leader Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo. — didn’t seem to make much noise.

Why? Well, there’s the fact that Clinton’s taking up all the airtime. But also it’s because Daschle’s claim — “If you make over $300,000 a year, this tax cut means you get to buy a new Lexus. If you make $50,000 a year, you get to buy a muffler on your used car. That’s the difference. That’s what we’re talking about here. A Lexus versus a muffler” — wasn’t fully accurate. That “make over $300,000″ number works only if you ramp it up to over $1 million. A family making $300,000 would gain about a $10,000 tax cut — not bad, but hardly Lexus cash.

So, yes, the message needs to be accurate. And they need to settle on one distinct plan, which they apparently have now done. Internally, within the Democratic caucus, they have been divided over whether they should offer big tax cuts of their own, or channel the surplus toward deficit reduction, or pay for new popular government programs like a prescription drug benefit for seniors. It wasn’t until last week that the caucus decided on its one-third/one-third/one-third plan, in which the surplus will be split evenly among all these priorities.

“Conrad’s going to play point man on this,” says a senior Senate Democratic aide, referring to Sen. Kent Conrad from North Dakota, the only Democrat on both the budget and finance committees. “This will be our most visible endeavor against the president.”

Neither Conrad nor Daschle nor Gephardt has emerged as a compelling spokesman against the president. It’s early yet, of course. Maybe Conrad will prove scintillating; maybe Bayh or Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina will emerge as a star, but right now there does seem to be something of a charisma deficit on the left side of the aisle. If you thought Al Gore was wanting in the sex-appeal department, wait till you see his demon spawn, extras from “Night of the Barely-Living Dead.”

And image is important. “The Bush people — and I credit [communications adviser] Karen Hughes with this — are brilliant at packaging,” says the liberal advocacy group executive. “They’ve done a marvelous job on taking the offensive on their issues, with message discipline in a way we haven’t seen in the last eight years.”

Frank, though, says that Bush has had less success than is widely believed, losing a few of these battles — but he’s a skilled politician. “Bush is very smart,” Frank says. “You don’t see the fights — he gives up better than a lot of people.” The ill-fated nomination of Linda Chavez as labor secretary, and the inclusion of a firm commitment to school vouchers in his education plan were both examples of political liabilities that he quickly dropped when he realized public sentiment was against him.

And Democrats vow that Bush will be even less successful when he has to get specific. Bayh, the newly elected chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, says voters can expect to see more Democratic spine when the tax plan truly hits the Hill. As opposed to the nomination of John Ashcroft, which was greeted with 42 Democrats’ voting nay, but eight defections. Bayh says that the “42″ number — which can support a filibuster in the case of a future Supreme Court nomination — is far more significant than the eight.

Bayh also points out that moderate Republicans like Sens. Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island “are expressing doubts about the tax plan.” Still, while deferring vote-counting and party cohesion matters to Tom Daschle, Bayh vows that there won’t be eight Democrats peeling off on the Bush tax cut.

“The real test is going to come not just from ‘changing the tone,’ but trying to make progress on substance,” says Bayh.

But the Democrats are, frankly, still trying to figure this Bush guy out. Sure, in terms of the size of his tax cut, the Ashcroft and Olson nominations, the executive orders against family planning abroad, Bush sure seems like he’s governing from the far right.

Bayh, for one, wonders about that. “The question is, is this a negotiating tactic or are these positions where he’s going to remain?” Bayh asks. “It may be that he’s taking these positions for bargaining purposes we can strike a compromise from; we don’t know yet. You know, we’re less than a month into this. We don’t know how he’s going to operate yet.”

“He seems to want to secure the far right, put some capital in the bank there,” Bayh says, but wonders “if he did that so as to give himself more leeway to get to the center later on.”

Indeed, some members are trying their darnedest to divine Bush’s actual intentions. Rep. Joe Hoeffel, for instance, is a Democrat who represents much of Montgomery County, Pa. — a crucial swing area of the country, wealthy leafy Republican suburbs whose voters went for Gore. And Hoeffel is intrigued by what he sees as a possible indication that Bush is willing to compromise on the size of his tax cut.

The “$1.6 trillion” tax cut actually has a $2.4 trillion price tag, Hoeffel says, repeating one of the more recent Democratic talking points. You start out with $1.6 trillion, then tack on $200 billion to make it retroactive to Jan. 1, as Bush has said he wants. Then you tack on another $400 billion in lost interest payments on the national debt. Then there’s another $200 billion in adjusting the alternative minimum tax. (This is a tax once added to make sure that wealthy people paid something. But it wasn’t inflation adjusted, and — especially with Bush’s proposed tax cut, it’s one that is now hitting middle-income folks in a way it wasn’t supposed to.)

“But Bush keeps saying, ‘No, it’s $1.6 trillion, $1.6 trillion, $1.6 trillion,’” Hoeffel says. “I think he’s signaling that he’s willing to compromise, to make it less expensive, to make adjustments down the road.”

Which may be one of the more fundamental points: As believers in government, Democrats are, in general, less inclined to throw out the baby with the bath water. And there seem to be a number of Democrats who actually want to get something accomplished with Bush. Not on the tax cut, which Hoeffel says he will almost definitely vote against in its present form, but on education.

“Just a few years ago, Republicans wanted to demolish the Department of Education,” Hoeffel says. “Bush is proposing 85 percent of what the DLC was proposing a year ago through [Sen. Joseph] Lieberman and [Rep.] Cal Dooley” — a California Democrat. “Bush’s plan is night and day to where Bob Dole was, and we’re aware of that.”

And yet … Democrats do point to opportunities where Bush has feet of clay. For all his praise of Bush’s political skills and his appreciation of the fact that Bush came to the Democratic retreat, Hoeffel says that he was “surprised that he was so ill-prepared on the issues.” It was clear to all, Hoeffel says, that Bush didn’t know anything about the latest debate about the census, and the use (and potential benefits and pratfalls) of statistical sampling. Worse, Bush didn’t seem to fully understand his executive order cutting off U.S. aid to international family planning agencies.

“I don’t think he’d understood what he’d done,” Hoeffel says. “He seemed to think that he’d cut off money to fund abortions overseas, when of course that was already illegal.”

Bush, of course, has yet to be asked about this matter: He hasn’t held a formal press conference as president. Which could be at least part of the reason why he’s doing so well and the Democrats aren’t.