By Dana Milbank and Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday Page A01

This week's fifth meeting between President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox promises to be an international lovefest. Bush, celebrating their "personal
friendship," made Fox the subject of his first foreign trip in February and his first state visit this week. Fox reciprocated Bush's statements of affection.

In fact, the relationship is a good bit more complicated.

Bush and Fox did not know each other well until their elections, and Bush campaign advisers squabbled with Fox campaign advisers. Perceiving that Bush had given
an implied endorsement to Fox's opponent, Fox and his aides let Bush call five times before taking his congratulatory call after Fox's July 2000 victory, aides said. A
Fox campaign aide said his Bush counterpart had "scoffed" at the notion of a Fox victory.

Things are very different now, as the two leaders plan a state dinner Wednesday and a visit to Toledo on Thursday. Bush and his advisers see Fox, who is hugely
popular among millions of Mexican Americans, as a key to the president's success with Hispanics and his reelection in 2004. And Mexican policy experts say Fox
needs the promise of U.S. investment and immigration policy changes to boost his stature in Mexico and prospects for his political reforms.

Both men, naturally, see mutual benefit from expanded trade and economic growth. But in a deeper sense, political analysts say, Fox needs Bush's respect, and Bush
needs Fox's imprimatur. "Each is going into this feeling he has a benefit to be gained," said Dan Fisk, the Heritage Foundation's Latin American specialist.

Presidential friendships, typically U.S.-British pairings such as Thatcher and Reagan and Blair and Clinton, are often based on mutual need. And Bush, at least
superficially, has much in common with Fox. Both are former governors and gentlemen ranchers. Bush promised to be a different kind of Republican, while Fox
ended the 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by its Spanish initials, PRI. And both are cowboy boot-wearing former salesmen. "They are
similar stylistically," said Tony Garza, who was Bush's secretary of state when Bush and Fox first met in 1996. "They're entrepreneurial as opposed to corporatist.
They appreciate the need to sell and close."

At the moment, though, there is a crucial difference: Fox is a popular figure in Mexico even though his party is badly outnumbered in Mexico's Congress and so far he
has been unable to pass his reform plans. Bush has middling popularity but a more successful record, thanks to his party's control, until recently at least, of Congress.
Fox's most recent rating in the Reforma newspaper poll is an impressive 64 percent, but sliding from his high of 70 percent in February partly due to a badly slumping
economy. Bush, by contrast, measures about 55 percent in job-approval polls, with many Americans believing he has not demonstrated the "compassionate
conservatism" promised in the campaign.

That is where Fox comes in. If Bush is to win reelection in 2004, he must do better among Latinos than the 35 percent he got last year. "If he got the same
percentage among all demographic groups, he'd lose by 3 million votes" in 2004, said Matthew Dowd, a Bush campaign adviser who now coordinates polling for the
Republican National Committee. But if Bush can move his share of the Hispanic vote up by 3 to 5 percentage points, he's back in contention in 2004, a goal Dowd
said is "very doable."

Fox, by vanquishing the long-dominant PRI, is a hero to Mexican Americans in the mold of Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel. He is particularly popular among
middle- and upper-income Latinos, the ones most likely to vote Republican. "If people see the president has this unique relationship with Mexico and Fox, that's very
helpful," Dowd said.

Bush officials say the Fox visit is just part of an unprecedented effort to woo Hispanics. Bush, who as a Texan has always worked closely with Latinos, was the first
president to give a radio address in Spanish and the first to hold Cuban Independence Day and Cinco de Mayo events at the White House. "This is all being done
because this is something the president firmly believes," a Bush aide said. "This is a great example of where good policy will have good political implications."

Charles Kamasaki, an official with the Hispanic group National Council of La Raza, said Bush's administration has indeed "demonstrated its ability to show respect
not just for Fox but for a lot of our neighbors to the South." He says he believes the Fox relationship may get Bush more help from Mexico in areas such as law
enforcement. But the goodwill would disappear quickly, Kamasaki said, if Bush does not follow through on a significant plan floated by his administration to legalize
undocumented immigrants. That "would be enormously deflating," Kamasaki said.

Dowd thinks Bush can win over Latinos without a dramatic immigration overhaul. "Hispanic voters aren't going to base their vote on the details of immigration policy,"
he said, noting that their top concerns are education, jobs and home ownership. Mostly, Hispanic voters want a show of respect from Bush for their culture and
ancestral countries.

With Fox, Bush can anthropomorphize one of his main foreign-policy goals -- shifting American attention to this hemisphere -- in the same way Clinton's friendship
with Israel's Yitzhak Rabin symbolized Clinton's interest in the Middle East. Fox also lets Bush answer critics who call him an "isolationist" or a "unilateralist" --
charges the Democrats have made as Bush abandons or opposes a number of international agreements. "Vicente Fox is the closest thing to a friend George Bush has
on the international stage," said a Democratic pollster who has worked in Mexico.

While Fox figures prominently in Bush's reelection hopes, Fox needs more immediate and substantive help from Bush. Fox is yet to reform his nation's tax system or
end the Chiapas rebellion, and his economy is far from the 7 percent growth he promised. Fox desperately needs gestures from Bush to vindicate Fox's pro-U.S.
stance -- a dangerous position in Mexico, which, though the world's 10th largest economy, has an inferiority complex when it comes to the "colossus to the north."
The PRI ran an ad during the campaign criticizing Fox for deleting a rebuke of American immigration policy from remarks he made to the California Legislature.

Fox is seeking an easing of restrictions on Mexican trucks (a Bush policy being blocked by the Senate) as well as more investment (there is a State Department
meeting on the subject Tuesday) and, most of all, immigration changes. "The Fox administration has raised expectations at home that some kind of significant deal is in
the offing," said Delal Baer, who heads the Mexico Project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Fox wants to "take home at least a partial victory on
immigration," she said, though all he is likely to get this week is a general statement of principles.

More broadly, Fox craves a larger place for Mexico in U.S. foreign policy, as a mediator between South America and North America exerting a "soft power," as
Mexican officials have put it, on the United States. "Fox looks at himself as an equal, like he's not looking for a handout," said Gabriela Lemus, a dual U.S.-Mexican
citizen who is in charge of policy for the League of United Latin American Citizens. "It's all about national pride."

Bush has done much to pay respects to Fox and his country. Visiting Fox's ranch in February, Bush called it "a really good opportunity to renew our personal
friendship." Bush also said at the time: "I've known him from before and I've got a good relationship with him. It's why I'm going to Mexico."

Bush and Fox did know each other, but not well. They met once before Fox was elected, for 30 minutes in Austin in 1996, when Fox was governor of Guanajuato.

Four years later, when both were running for president, Bush appeared in Los Angeles on April 7 with PRI candidate Francisco Labastida's wife, and is said to have
spoken well of Labastida's education plan. That irked Fox aides, who already felt slighted by the Clinton administration. Fredo Arias-King, then an aide to Fox,
asked Bush advisers Condoleezza Rice and Robert B. Zoellick to arrange a similar meeting with Fox's daughter. "The pro-PRI press has been playing that
incessantly here as a tacit endorsement from the Republican candidate," Arias-King wrote in a May 2 e-mail. He later added that the PRI is "trumpeting" its meeting
with the candidate's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and requested the "same opportunity."

Zoellick, on May 19, warned that it "will be tough" to arrange an "offsetting contact." On May 20, Arias-King shot back that Clinton-Gore, "and now the Bushes,
have deprived us of all arguments to justify believing in the good intentions of the U.S. toward Mexican democracy. Bob, I would hate to be in your shoes when Bush
asks why the pro-democracy Mexicans are so distrustful of him."

On May 22, Zoellick replied that the "people who make the decisions in Austin are obviously concentrating on our election," and he complained that the Fox aide's
e-mail sounded like a threat. No meeting was arranged.

Arias-King, who provided a copy of the e-mail exchange, said Zoellick, now the U.S. trade representative, "made it more or less clear that candidate George Bush
was off-limits" to people from Fox's National Action Party. In a last phone call, Arias-King said, "Zoellick scoffed at the idea that Fox could win."

Arias-King, who no longer works for Fox, said Fox was "upset" when told of the Bush campaign's behavior. Arias-King said Rice later told him that the brush-off
"was a mistake."

A former Bush adviser said the episode was "absolutely not" meant as a slight, although Heritage's Fisk said the Bush campaign's unwillingness to be helpful was
interpreted that way by various Fox aides. "From their perspective, it would've at least leveled the playing field." But once Bush made such a determined effort to win
over Fox and his government, "those stories seemed to disappear," Fisk noted.

Those following Bush's policy toward Mexico say Bush advisers still have some doubts about Fox. They worry that in a deeper economic slump in Mexico, Fox
could become more of a populist, anti-American leader. They are also fearful of Fox's foreign minister Jorge G. Castaneda, who was one of the most vocal
opponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s. "While [Fox] is perceived as being an unabashedly pro-American Marlboro Man, in
fact he is fairly cautious," said a Mexico expert with ties to Bush. "Looking over his shoulder, he doesn't want to appear at home to be a sellout of Mexico's
interests."

So far, though, Bush's late but forceful bid for Fox's friendship appears to have had the desired effect. Visiting Fox and his mother in February, Bush received quite
an endorsement from Fox. "Let me tell you, Mr. President, that you will always be welcome, in this your home," he said, switching from Spanish to English. "I want
you to know that we consider you a friend of Mexico, a friend of Mexican people and a friend of mine."

                                               © 2001 The Washington Post Company