8-02-2001: WASHINGTON -- As President Bush strode to the White House podium with Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Ga., Wednesday evening to announce that a compromise on the patients' bill of rights had been reached, no one was more surprised than Rep. Greg Ganske, R-Iowa. After all, it was Ganske's bill that Norwood was supposedly compromising on.

And it was Ganske -- as well as Ganske's cosponsor, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. -- whom Norwood had promised to talk to before making any agreements with the White House. Which he clearly hadn't done.

And it was Ganske, Dingell and key conservative "Blue Dog" Democrat Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., with whom Norwood was supposed to be meeting that afternoon at 4:30, though Norwood hadn't shown up for some reason. As the meeting broke up at around 5:30 p.m., suddenly that reason became clearer, as the cable news networks cut from the latest on missing intern Chandra Levy and beamed into the White House where Bush and Norwood were making their momentous announcement.

"The outline of this agreement, which will later tonight be put into language ... protect[s] the patients of this country," Norwood announced. "The stakeholders that have worked for me and with me, in both parties, are going to be very pleased with this because we accomplished the very goals we started out to do."

But as of Wednesday night, not one of the stakeholders sounded pleased.

"Charlie cut his own deal with the White House, and he didn't bother to tell any of us anything," a clearly agitated Ganske told Salon. "It had better be a damn good deal. I'll tell you what, he may have killed the patients' bill of rights," Ganske continued. "Because I think this is such bad faith, heaven knows now what the Senate will ever do."

"I consider this a breach of a bipartisan effort that has been going on for years," Berry said. "That is unfortunate, because it means that we will not pass a patients' bill of rights through the Congress this year. Even if the House passes the compromise, the Senate will certainly kill it.

"There was nothing bipartisan about the White House approach to this issue, which is a shame," Berry added, "because this has always been a bipartisan effort on our side."

An hour after the Bush-Norwood announcement, Ganske still was in the dark as to the details of the agreement between Norwood and Bush. Norwood set up a 7:30 p.m. meeting to brief his three cosponsors, as well as the leaders of the fight in the Senate, Sens. John Edwards, D-N.C., Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and John McCain, R-Ariz.

"If it's such a good deal, why wouldn't he bother to give his cohorts and colleagues who've worked with him on this for years a heads-up?" Ganske asked before the meeting. "He had told John Dingell -- and he personally told me -- that he would not cut a deal without personally talking to us."

The scene was reminiscent of February when Bush's liaison to the Senate, Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., was dispatched to negotiate a deal on patients' rights with Democrats Edwards and Kennedy as long as McCain was kept out of the deal. "It became clear that this was just an agreement between Norwood and the White House," said Mike Briggs, spokesman for Edwards, after the 7:30 meeting. "And Norwood is pretty fuzzy on the details." Asked what Edwards thinks of the proposal, Briggs said, "He thinks that it doesn't work."

Briggs said that not one of the participants at the 7:30 meeting, save for Norwood, found the deal acceptable.

The deal was a long time coming. Norwood took some heat earlier in the year when he and Ganske were called to the White House and pressured by senior strategist Karl Rove to refrain from introducing their bill until they could come to a compromise. Ganske didn't adhere to Rove's request, but Norwood did. Frustrated after months of getting nowhere, Norwood broke away from the White House and rejoined his original group. In previous incarnations, Norwood had been the original drafter of the bill, "the Norwood-Dingell bill" that Vice President Al Gore continuously, clumsily harangued then-Gov. George W. Bush for not supporting in the third presidential debate. On Wednesday, Norwood flip-flopped again, in what was hailed as a major victory for the White House.