Election Section

WASHINGTON — What Americans saw in the presidential campaign, they’re pretty much getting in the president. 

Three months on the job, President Bush is pushing the tax cuts and education package he promised as a candidate, while bending to some political realities on both. 

He’s broken a few environmental promises. But overall, say those who study presidential policy, he’s been true to his limited agenda. 

“The relationship between campaigning and governance is clear in this president,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Few of the big promises have worked through the pipeline but that’s not unusual this early. 

“What 100 days really tells you is what’s going to come next,” Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said Thursday from Crawford, Texas, where the Republican president was visiting his ranch. 

“The staff’s directions are to implement the president’s program,” Fleischer said. “We haven’t set an artificial deadline.” 

Bush seems likely to succeed with tax relief, if not with the whole tax package he came to Washington to sell. 

His pledge to put more money and effort into education is being borne out, too, although his wish to give parents school vouchers in everything but name may fall by the wayside. 

Bush is also pressing ahead with giving religious groups access to tax dollars to help them provide social services, an idea that dates to the earliest days of his candidacy. 

By this point in 1993, Bill Clinton had already built piles of promises kept, broken and tangled. 

Family leave was accomplished. Middle-class tax relief was abandoned. The issue of gays in the military was a hopeless mess. 

To James Pfiffner, a George Mason University political scientist who wrote “The Strategic Presidency: Hitting the Ground Running,” Bush has lived up to the subtitle of that book. 

With his “rifle” approach, Bush is striking a greater percentage of targets than Clinton did with his shotgun, Pfiffner said. 

“You maximize your chances if you focus narrowly,” he said. “He’s been very disciplined and on message.” 

The ambiguity some say is inherent in being a “compassionate conservative” has come in handy for the president, too. 

“Bush ran a more thematic campaign and one of the realities of doing so is that it’s harder to hold you accountable for kept and broken promises,” Jamieson said. “He was never forced to a level of detail.” 

Not everything is moving apace. 

Bush still hopes to allow oil drilling in the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which he says is important for a secure energy future. But his administration is showing reluctance to press the matter against congressional opposition. 

One of his defining campaign promises was to let younger workers use some of their Social Security taxes to build private retirement accounts. 

That seems destined to be studied a good long time before anything happens. The stock market is weaker than when he floated the plan and changing Social Security is hard in the best of times. 

Just as Clinton started out with liberal elements of his agenda, Bush began with a tilt to the right. 

On the environment, Bush broke a commitment on the control of carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, and he proposes to spend $13 million to protect tropical forests instead of the minimum $100 million a year he promised in the campaign. 

He opposed the Kyoto treaty on global warming before and after Election Day. 

Beyond substance, Bush promised a new tone – more civility, less partisanship, honor in the White House. 

To that end, he has extended tender considerations to lawmakers and, in a striking outreach early on, went to Democratic congressional retreats. 

Yet while granting him certain charms, Democratic leaders say he’s not been interested in compromise. 

“It is my way or the highway every day,” said Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, the House minority leader. 

Bush, in contrast, believes there has been a break from the bickering of the past, Fleischer said. “He knows it’s not totally changed but he’s seeing it change and change for the better.” 

That’s one area of disagreement between Bush and Democratic leaders: They dispute how well they’re getting along.