Washington ? For months, President Bush’s Republican allies and Democratic rivals thought they knew the White House strategy: Wrap absolutely everything, from spending priorities to economic policy, in the shawl of the war against terror and use the cover of a national emergency to win domestic battles and ensure the president’s re-election.

That worked for everyone. Conservatives, especially religious activists still resentful of how Bush played down social issues in the 2000 campaign, came to believe the president would try to bend American civilization to the right while he was prosecuting the war to save Western civilization. Liberals, frustrated with their inability to take on a president in wartime, came to believe Bush finally had provided them an opening  a chance to accuse him of packing conservative battalions into the Trojan horse of war.

Now neither side is quite so sure  and now the president’s real strategies, both for the war on terrorism and for the 2004 election, are slowly becoming clear.

Republicans on Capitol Hill now are gradually concluding that they will get almost no help from the White House on anything but the barest domestic agenda. Democrats are gradually concluding that Bush is going to give them almost no ammunition to portray him as an arm of the religious-conservative movement or an instrument of the business lobby. This subtle change means substantial alterations in the two parties’ strategies as they prepare for the midterm congressional elections and the presidential election in 2004, and could have great significance for the shape of politics in the next several years.

It means, for example, that the president will ask little of the Congress in the next several years. He’s already won an education bill with the assistance of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat. His allies on Capitol Hill have concluded he’s looking for action in only two additional matters this year, trade and energy. For the rest, he’ll be happy with just talk.

And there will be talk. The White House knows that the president’s father lost his re-election battle in part because he didn’t talk early enough, forcefully enough or empathetically enough about domestic issues, especially the economy. The son has learned the lessons of the father, which is why he talked early, forcefully and empathetically about a recession that many Democrats didn’t think had even begun yet.

He’ll continue to stress economic and domestic issues  on the stump, but not on Capitol Hill and perhaps not even in the federal bureaucracy. Despite the fanfare over the education bill, the president wants to cut 26 programs that actually are part of the package he signed this year. These programs account for about $844 million.

“He’s much more interested in his position and stature as commander in chief than he is in being legislator in chief,” said Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, one of 14 Democrats seeking re-election this autumn. “It’s smart  if you’re looking at the next election.”

In truth, there have been remarkably few changes in the approach and style of President Bush. He’s still more comfortable with a limited agenda than with a sprawling one. He’s still willing to delegate, even at times of great national peril. He’s still an outsider, ill at ease with the customs and assumptions of the political establishment.

But even as Bush has remained true to his impulses and inclinations, the changing way Washington views the president is indicative of the way Washington has changed. The capital has grown accustomed not only to a war footing but also to the intrusion of security procedures. Indeed, hardly anyone raised a ruckus or even an eyebrow the other day when the National Park Service announced it would begin electronic surveillance of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials. The irony or tragedy could not have been more stark; the monuments and memorials are physical celebrations of American freedom. But in the current atmosphere, Jefferson’s belief that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty has taken on new meaning.

Political figures still mean to debate whether the United States should take any action in Iraq, but already that debate has acquired a whiff of ceremony, not reality. Even the biggest skeptics of Bush’s “axis of evil” rhetoric believe the president will take the war against terror to Baghdad. “Regrettably, he’s stifling questions about war-policy issues, especially about Iraq,” said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat.

But the president has determined that he will be remembered as a war president and not as a domestic president  and he is determined not to be distracted from what he regards as his appointment with history.

“Fifty years from, now people will look at this administration with one question: When we were called upon to respond to a true crisis, and to unify the country and build an international coalition, were we successful?” said Rep. John E. Sununu, the New Hampshire Republican now seeking a Senate seat. The president believes his reputation  and, not incidentally, his re-election  depend on the answer, and the way he is answering it is already shaping the politics of his time.