From the agenda it produced to its very location in the Victorian-style President's Room in the Capitol, the closed-door meeting was designed to signal voters that both sides want a year of compromise with minimal partisan sniping. It was also aimed at persuading the participants that they can trust each other and at finding ways to quickly yield legislative accomplishments.
"We're trying to find a way to take the minimum number of pot shots at each other and get on with our work," Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) told reporters after the meeting, which lasted just over an hour. "And that's not always easy. I think it's a learned trait, and we're trying to learn how to do that."
Vice President Al Gore called the session "an excellent start" and said both parties want to prevent disagreements "from generating the kind of tension that would slow down progress in the areas where we know we can eventually find agreement."
The agenda will include improving schools, combatting juvenile crime and finding ways to help welfare recipients find jobs. Participants said working groups of lawmakers and administration officials would be established for each area in hopes of reaching early agreements.
The meeting was opened with a prayer by Senate Chaplain Lloyd Ogilvie, who asked for divine guidance of the leaders, participants said.
The backdrop for the meeting: A 1996 election campaign in which still-bitter Republicans said Clinton unfairly accused them of seeking to ravage Medicare; GOP plans to investigate Democratic fund raising; and lingering disputes over the balanced-budget constitutional amendment and revamping campaign finance laws.
The campaign-financing issue is notably absent from the parties' mutually agreed priorities; Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, are divided on a solution. Also missing from the agenda are expanding children's health-care coverage, a Democratic priority; and an overhaul of toxic-waste cleanup laws, with Democrats objecting to GOP efforts to ease some penalties for corporations.
Even the issues on the bipartisan agenda are rife with differences. Both sides agree the budget must be balanced by 2002 but champion different mixes of savings. Clinton wants narrower tax cuts than Republicans and more money for education and welfare clients, too.
Conceding this, Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles (R-Okla.) said that even for the five agenda items, the two sides may have to settle for examining "some things we have in common we might be able to break out and pass."
The two sides set no deadlines. "The timetable is as swiftly as possible on all these issues," Gore said.
In a signal of possible problems ahead, though, some members of the two parties seemed to emerge with some different interpretations of what they had agreed to.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, some GOP participants said Clinton asked both sides to refrain from misleading attacks on each other as they struggle to work out their differences. Democrats, however, said there was no such discussion.
And on the upcoming balanced-budget effort - the year's top-tier issue - Lott and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga) said Congress would work off a "base document" that both sides would be able to amend. Some Republicans, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that document would be Clinton's fiscal 1998 budget, which he produced last week.
But Democratic participants, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that was a GOP suggestion - not an agreement. The difference is significant because Republican leaders would like to avoid countering with their own budget-balancing plan, thereby avoiding Democratic attacks.
Clinton and the lawmakers agreed to focus their attention on the crime-ridden, financially strapped District of Columbia, but without specifics.
In a light moment described by people in the meeting, Senate Minority Whip Wendell Ford (D-Ky.) jokingly said that 94-year-old Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) who just left the hospital after treatment for the flu, would have gone home sooner if he'd taken his medicine.
Asked what the medicine was, Thurmond responded, "Kentucky whiskey."