Yesterday's budget powwow at the White House was a theatrical prelude to the endgame that will play out over the next week.

The public message following the get-together was that everyone is prepared to be nice to everyone else. Substantively, only one of the options for finalizing next year's budget seems to have been eliminated. The President made no pitch for his tax increases, which had been unanimously rejected by the House earlier in the day. Enough said.

This leaves three options for White House and Hill budget negotiators: 1) dip into the trust fund; 2) more budget gimmicks; or 3) across-the-board cuts in spending. Republicans who have staked their yearlong strategy and entire communications campaign on not touching the Social Security trust fund won't now join the President in raiding it. So, that leaves either budget trickery to mask a Social Security raid, or trimming all the remaining appropriations bills to keep their pledge. Republicans fear that more gimmickry will give credence to the administration's claim that they have already raided the fund. If you can't trust the Republicans to be straight on the rest of the budget, why believe them on Social Security? So, a small (in the one-percent range) cut in spending is increasingly viewed on the Hill as a way to give credibility to the GOP's commitment on Social Security.

How will it play out? The preferred option for the administration, and even some Republican appropriators, is to bundle the remaining spending bills all together in order to make it easier to move funding from one to another. This should be avoided. Once the President signs the pending defense bill, he will lose the cash cow he'd like to use to beef up his favorite spending programs.

Get out your Cajun scalpels.

Elizabeth Dole dropped out of the presidential race today, blaming her inability to go the distance on George W. Bush's financial advantage. Bush does indeed have advantages over Dole: not least, that he governs the second-largest state in the union while she has never been elected to anything. But Mrs. Dole entered the race in a strong position herself, having won enormous goodwill from her time at the Red Cross and respect for the discipline and savvy she has shown throughout her career. If she was unable to capitalize on these strengths, it was because she started her campaign by running to the left (on issues such as gun control) and then, when that did not work, flailed around ineffectually. Her sex was not enough to attract voters -- something the eventual Republican nominee should consider when choosing his running mate.

Corporate donations to political parties - a.k.a., soft money - are supposed to be corrupting because they are unlimited. Sen. John McCain, arguing for a ban, says that, if not for these contributions, the budget would be trimmed of pork. Yet politicians support pork-barrel project for the sakes of their constituents, not their contributors, which is why the projects are generally in the pols' home districts. (The biggest offender, by the way, when it comes to "unauthorized appropriations," which McCain describes as pork, is the Commerce Committee. Chairman: John McCain.) In any case, McCain's bill is dead for the year. Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell worked tirelessly and with remorseless logic to kill it, ignoring the vituperation of a media obsessed with campaign-finance reform. Standing up to the powers that be, holding fast to principle, being one's own man: These are the qualities reformers say they want in politicians, and, as Mitch McConnell demonstrates, they have nothing to do with soft money or its absence.

Updated By:
Ramesh Ponnuru - Senior Editor
John J. Miller - National Political Reporter
Kate Dwyer - Editorial Associate