Until then, Cheney had assiduously avoided meeting with California Democrats to the point of excluding them from briefings even when other Western state Democrats were invited. But with California’s energy shortfall reaching crisis proportions, Cheney grudgingly set aside an hour last week to hear from the California delegation. He was in enemy territory, and he wasn’t happy about it. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state delegation 32 to 20. Cheney’s attitude, according to Democratic Rep. Ellen Tauscher, was one of “irritated disdain-I’m only here because I have to be.” His body language conveyed a man bored with what he viewed as trivialities. He’d heard it all before, the whining, the finger-pointing, and he seemed impatient. Surely nobody present could tell him anything he didn’t already know.

With the same avuncular air he adopts for the Sunday-morning talk shows, Cheney outlined the administration’s position. Simply put, it amounts to California got into this mess, and it’s up to California to get out of it. “His attitude is stunning,” says Tauscher. “You did it to yourself. We can’t help.”

The temperature began to rise in the room as it became clear that Cheney, aside from spending the hour, planned to offer nothing to ease the energy situation in California. “We’re not asking for anything the law doesn’t provide for, and we need to have our citizens paid attention to,” declared Rep. Anna Eshoo, her voice reasonably toned but with evident emotion. Cheney responded with what some in the room interpreted as a condescending tone. He repeated the administration’s mantra: price caps don’t work; they discourage production; and they discourage conservation. It was free-market economics 101. “But it’s not a free market, it’s a freak market,” says Tauscher.

Knowing that California has more than a dozen power plants coming on line, and that the state is second only to Rhode Island in conservation, the vice president’s words landed like a warmed-over press release. Eshoo tried to follow up. She got as far as “Mr. Vice President, with all due respect …”

“Stop it. You’re being very rude. You’re interrupting,” Cheney snapped, cutting off his questioner the way a headmaster might handle an unruly student. This was a side of the vice president that even veteran lawmakers had never seen. “This was beyond hair-trigger,” says Tauscher. “This is somebody who has such a visceral reaction to anybody questioning him that he just flattens you.”

It’s no wonder that when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)ordered “price mitigation,” Cheney and others in the administration stoutly insisted they are not price controls. That’s a position most analysts find absurd, noting that FERC must have consulted with a thesaurus to find a euphemism.

If you can’t change the tone in Washington, change the words.

WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE?

Republicans are grumbling about the leadership vacuum in the Senate. Minority Leader Trent Lott is so busy sulking and pouting about his loss of power that he doesn’t show up for leadership meetings half the time. With the debate over a Patients’ Bill of Rights the first showdown between the new Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House, Lott’s lack of active participation is hobbling the GOP.

Health-care lobbyists on both sides of the fight agree privately that there will be a bill, and it will be a lot closer to the Kennedy-Edwards-McCain Democratic version than to the GOP’s offering. Democrats are giddy over the support they’re getting from the public. Polls say voters intuitively trust Ted Kennedy and John McCain on health care and distrust President Bush and the Republicans.

Watch the ongoing floor debate and you’ll note the rising-star status of North Carolina Democrat John Edwards, a former trial lawyer who has taken the lead in defending the Patients’ Bill of Rights as though he were in a courtroom pressing a personal-injury case. A winsome fellow with a Kennedyesque shock of hair and toothy smile, Edwards is “a quick study on anything you put in front of him,” says a Democratic aide. He is an appealing advocate against Republicans Judd Gregg and Don Nickles, whom Democrats dub “The Duo of Doom.”

NO FREE RIDES FOR DEMOCRATS

Conservatives are still talking among themselves about Bush’s breach of etiquette in inviting former Clinton spokesman Lanny Davis aboard Air Force One. On the surface, the invite looks perfectly harmless. Bush and Davis were classmates at Yale, and Bush gave Davis a lift back to Washington after the college’s reunion weekend and anniversary celebration last month. Some of Davis’s friends were amused to learn that he was so eager to ride with the president that he had evidently skipped hearing Bush’s speech in order to be in place on the tarmac to board Air Force One. But conservatives were not amused. “Flying Air Force One is an honor,” says one miffed Bush supporter. “It shouldn’t be given to someone like Davis.” He may be an old college friend to Bush, but to conservatives, he is a Clinton defender, and for that he apparently can’t be forgiven.