Washington ? George H.W. Bush accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 1988 by taking an unshakable anti-tax vow, only to agree two years later to raise taxes to fight the deficit. Bill Clinton criticized the Republicans’ policies on China, only to continue them once he was in the White House. The American presidency has many qualities, but predictability is not one of them.

So, in truth, no one should be surprised by two recent surprises from President George W. Bush his warm embrace of a volunteerism program once assailed by conservatives, and growing indications from the White House that a Republican president might well sign a campaign overhaul bill reviled by the Republican congressional leadership.

Even so, these two developments show Bush, while firm in his resolve to battle terrorism around the globe and steady in his dedication to new cuts in federal taxes, nevertheless is a work in progress. His presidency is far from finished, and his ideology is far from fixed.

The result is one of those moments Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan had almost none of them, but Richard M. Nixon, the first President Bush and Clinton produced them with regularity when the president’s usual rivals are bewitched and his usual allies are bothered and bewildered.

Last week, the president unveiled a $560 million volunteerism program, complete with boosts to the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps and Senior Corps. The war in Central Asia and changing cultural values conspired to place him, surely for the first time, in a tradition begun by President John F. Kennedy and continued by Clinton, and in a program dreamed up by midcentury liberals such as Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota and Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, the very models of the Midwestern progressivism of the time.

For years, conservatives bridled at AmeriCorps, seeing it as a symbol of big spending and big government and as a subsidy for left-leaning social and environmental causes. It was a particular target of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and of Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the chairman of an education and workforce oversight committee.

Now, however, volunteerism is one of the elements of the new struggle against terrorism and its ally, complacency. “At home, you can fight evil with acts of goodness,” Bush said last week in Winston-Salem, N.C. “You overcome the evil in society by doing something to help somebody.” And Hoekstra, who once wanted to eliminate AmeriCorps, now promises a bipartisan effort to support volunteerism. “We need to have volunteerism because it is one of the things about America and the American spirit that make us different,” he said in an interview. “We need it especially now.”

With the Enron financial scandal thrusting an administration headed by two former energy executives on the defensive, Bush may feel that way about an overhaul of the campaign-finance system. For years Republican leaders have opposed efforts to change the system; former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, for example, was a particularly virulent opponent of earlier legislation that didn’t even include the restrictions on unregulated soft money at the heart of today’s bills.

Capitol Hill Republicans, fearful that change is coming, now are showing unusual creativity in sending so-called “soft money” across the country; they’re sending bundles across state lines while soft money is still legal in the expectation that it might soon be eliminated. This winter, former Red Cross president Elizabeth H. Dole, a Republican candidate for the Senate in North Carolina, is facing uncomfortable questions about contributions she received from Enron executives. (She donated about a quarter of her take from an Enron luncheon to a fund for displaced Enron employees.)

But Bush, who in 2000 showed his fund-raising prowess, has been far more open to banning corporate and labor money than the GOP establishment. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer has said the president “can’t be counted on to veto” a campaign-finance bill, which is the way the White House tells Republican lawmakers that they shouldn’t expect to be saved by the stroke of the president’s pen. When Rep. Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts last month became the 218th lawmaker to sign a petition forcing a House vote on the legislation, it became clear that the White House viewpoint was more than theoretical.

Bush knows that he’s running for office only one more time. He knows that his own re-election campaign in 2004 can survive and thrive under any campaign-finance scheme, even the elimination of soft money. He knows, moreover, that campaign-finance overhaul is the most important cause in the life of Sen. John S. McCain of Arizona who, until about 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, was still harboring presidential ambitions, and may have them still. All of that’s why the groups who want to eliminate soft money have a surprising ally in their pocket: the president.