No president has been influenced by his women advisers as much as President Bush.

Two women officials who wield extraordinary power behind the throne are Karen Hughes, the White House counselor with Texas Republican roots, and Condoleezza Rice, the first woman in history to hold the critical post of national security adviser.

Other aides in the White House inner circle often hear the president say: "What does Karen think?" or "Where's Karen?"

Hughes was Bush's press secretary during his presidential campaign.

"Condi," as he calls Rice, has the president's ear when she briefs him daily on foreign policy issues. She also apparently has access to the Oval Office whenever she needs it. It's doubtful that Bush would make a decision in foreign affairs without first consulting her. Her expertise is the Cold War.

Hughes is in charge of communications, speechwriting and legislative strategy. A former television reporter in Dallas, she has worked for Bush since 1994 and seems to read him like a book. She is very protective and has been known to short-circuit reporters who chose to pry into what Bush has called his "young and irresponsible" youth.

Hughes, a newcomer to Washington, has consulted with other female GOP political pros, including Mary Matalin, who served as President George Bush's deputy campaign director in 1992, and Margaret Tutwiler, who was the top aide to James A. Baker when he was White House chief of staff in the Reagan administration. Baker picked her to be the State Department spokeswoman when he became secretary of state in the Bush administration. Now she's been named U.S. ambassador to Morocco in the new Bush administration.

I used to walk into the Oval Office for photo sessions in both Republican and Democratic administrations and wonder aloud, "Where are the women?" It is different today. Bush is clearly comfortable with intelligent, powerful women. And he has given them coveted White House posts that make them important players in his decision-making.

Both Hughes and Rice are members of Bush's original presidential campaign team; latecomers defer them to the Bush cause.

It is also apparent that his wife, Laura, in her quiet way, plays a strong role in his life behind-the-scenes. She isn't pushy or controversial. Bush has told many campaign audiences that he married above himself.

I thought he displayed a healthy lack of male ego until I read his quote:

"I have the best wife for the line of work that I'm in," he once said. "She doesn't try to steal the limelight."

The first lady, who Bush has nicknamed "first," reportedly blew the whistle on her husband's drinking after some 10 years of marriage. The word went around that she had told him: "Choose me or Jim Beam," a bourbon.

In a Bush biography written by Bill Minutaglio, a friend is quoted as saying Bush suffered a major hangover at a weekend party in Colorado in 1986. The friend reported Bush looked in the mirror and said to himself: "Someday I might embarrass my father. It might get my father in trouble." He never took another drink.

Mrs. Bush is a former schoolteacher and librarian, who has made literacy her first lady's crusade. The president is obviously not her star pupil, given his tendency to mangle the English language. His wife dismisses his articulation problem as not unusual for most people.

In a recent interview with the Washington Post, she said her husband "says the wrong words about the same amount of time that probably everybody says the wrong words."

"I think it's just gotten to be something that people think is funny, or demeaning — one of the two," she added.

Well, with all due respect, that's a stretch.

Bush likes to attribute his feisty personality to his mother, Barbara, who also made literacy her cause celebre during her White House years.

In his youth, Bush was closer to his mother than to his father, who held several top foreign policy jobs that involved constant travel and long absences from home.

The former first lady worked diligently for her son in last year's presidential campaign. Her zeal for victory seemed to be fueled by a desire for revenge for her husband's 1992 defeat by Bill Clinton.

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Former President Bill Clinton chose women to serve in the top Cabinet positions of secretary of state and attorney general for the first time in history.

But President Bush has given talented women the unprecedented chance to be among his most trusted advisers in the Oval Office.

So far the women in the inner circle are proving they are tough-minded, conservative and powerful — and protective of their boss. And they've crashed through the glass ceiling in the Oval Office, once a man's world.

It may never be the same.

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