Last Sunday's T-ball game on the White House South Lawn attracted at least a dozen members of President Bush's senior staff. Clustered behind home plate in their weekend casuals (press secretary Ari Fleischer in khakis, legislative affairs director Nick Calio in a bright green polo shirt), the giddy Bush aides cheered through an inning of toddler baseball. But one staffer not present to witness the president of the United States embrace the San Diego Chicken was Michael Gerson, Bush's chief speechwriter. Gerson had a prior engagement, but the truth is he doesn't like sports much anyway.

That Bush's top wordsmith doesn't share the president's passion for the national pastime isn't that surprising. Gerson, who, perhaps more than any other person, helped position Bush as a "compassionate conservative" during the campaign, has always seemed a bit out of place in the Bush team's sports-loving, nerd-hating milieu. But he's solved that problem by turning the speechwriting shop into an island of intellectualism, a kind of miniature think tank stocked with quirky conservatives who shape the White House's ideology as well as its rhetoric. And in doing so, he's making himself the most influential speechwriter in more than a generation.

By most accounts, Gerson is one of Bush's most prized advisers. "Bush personally chose him. Most presidents don't personally choose their writers," says one White House aide. This translates into access and authority that most recent speechwriters haven't enjoyed. Unlike many previous speechwriters, Gerson's office is in the West Wing of the White House, near the Oval Office, rather than at the Old Executive Office Building. Gerson also attends the daily 7:30 a.m. meeting of top Bush aides--a key indicator of White House clout.

In many ways, Gerson revives an earlier, higher-profile model of a speechwriter. "In pre-Nixon days," Carol Gelderman explains in All the Presidents' Words, her history of White House scribes, "speechwriters were a few close aides who had policy responsibilities and ready access to their presidents and for whom speechwriting was a secondary assignment." Up through LBJ's presidency, there was no formal office of speechwriting, as there is today. Franklin Roosevelt's wordsmith Samuel Rosenman, who coined the term "New Deal," had been a top Roosevelt adviser since FDR's days as governor of New York and wrote for him throughout his presidency. Theodore Sorensen worked for John Kennedy in the Senate and grew close enough to the president that he was at Kennedy's side through the entire Cuban missile crisis.

By contrast, ever since Nixon, speechwriters have perennially complained about being hired help. When William Safire offered a suggestion about Vietnam policy for a Nixon speech he was writing, he was removed from the assignment. Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan frequently complained about her second-class status. "If you think [Reagan] sounds stale, it's because the speechwriters haven't met with him in over a year," she once grumbled to a superior. During Bush I, writers took a pay cut, sat in the worst offices, were stripped of senior titles, and were even denied access to the White House mess. Noonan, who occasionally wrote for Bush, quipped to The New York Times, "[I]n terms of the political pecking order ... they are just above the people who clean up after Millie," Bush's dog.

hings are different in W.'s White House. "Neither Bush was a naturally articulate man. The elder Bush responded to his inarticulateness by denigrating the importance of words," explains one White House aide. "The son has responded to it by treating words with added respect." Bush has met at least twice with his entire speechwriting staff to give them an idea of what's on his mind. And while the president and others weigh in with ideas and edits, the speechwriters have some latitude to help craft Bush's agenda.

Gerson is the principal author of Bush's most important speeches (the Republican convention, the inaugural, the budget address to Congress). A self-described compassionate conservative, he was working on many of the ideas that now fall under that moniker as a Senate aide to Dan Coats in the mid-'90s. He sees compassionate conservatism as a way to reconcile what he considers the two most vital conservative intellectual traditions: libertarianism and Catholic social thought. While he didn't coin the phrase, he has thought through the oft-derided term more clearly than anyone else, including the president.

Like Gerson, the other speechwriters bring considerable intellectual heft, especially compared with the rest of the White House. David Frum, a smart conservative from The Weekly Standard whom Gerson brought in to write on economics, was the principal author of the president's little-noticed, but groundbreakingly harsh, criticism of the repression of religious liberties and human rights in China and Sudan, delivered to the American Jewish Committee last week. The idea for the speech was generated in Gerson's shop rather than by the National Security Council or the domestic policy team. Even after a cumbersome vetting process (during which four separate directorates of the NSC had to sign off on it), many of the ideas and strong language of the early drafts remained.

When putting together his shop, Gerson consciously picked writers with backgrounds in different strains of conservative thought. Frum is the libertarian. Peter Wehner, a former aide to Bill Bennett, is the neocon. Matthew Scully, a former reporter for The Washington Times, editor at National Review, and speechwriter for Dan Quayle, is also not a standard-issue conservative ideologue. His mentor was the late Bob Casey, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania who opposed abortion and had serious qualms about the death penalty. Scully is a strict vegetarian (he even drinks soy milk) and is known in the White House for his passion for animal welfare, which he explains in some of the same moral language one finds in Bush's speeches on the "culture of life." Gerson brought him on board partly because of his ability to cast Bush's anti-abortion message in terms of social justice rather than in the fire-and-brimstone tone of the religious right. And perhaps Gerson's greatest achievement has been his ability (with Scully's help) to craft a social-policy language for Bush that touches evangelical hearts without alienating the suburban soccer moms and ethnic Catholics who react negatively to hard-edged culture-war rhetoric.

Together, Gerson and his brain trust serve as a sort of highbrow refuge within the administration's generally corporate landscape. To avoid the White House echo chamber, Gerson has begun a series of roundtable discussions with outside writers. The team has met with ethicist Leon R. Kass, columnist Charles Krauthammer, and The New Republic's own Andrew Sullivan (in fact, all three are TNR contributors) for off-the-record sessions to discuss Bush and his administration. Papal biographer George Weigel is scheduled to drop by soon. The meetings are meant to reenergize the Bushies' thinking and give them a critical take on how they are doing. Some might snicker at the idea of conservatives like Sullivan and Krauthammer being considered critics, but, for this rather insular White House, it's not a bad start.

RYAN LIZZA is an associate editor of TNR.