The Jim Jeffords fiasco is getting all the (digital) ink, but it capped a week that already was adding up to a bad one for the Bush White House. On Monday, Cheney and his wife hosted hundreds of Republican fat cats at the vice president’s residence, an official, taxpayer-owned home on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. It was a piece of political theater that the Bushies should have been smart enough to avoid.

Yes, I know, it wasn’t a fund-raiser per se. But as my NEWSWEEK colleague Michael Isikoff noted when he broke the story on Newsweek.com, it’s hard to distinguish the event from the infamous White House “coffees” of the Clinton Years. The Bush team tried. The event was a “thank you,” not a prospecting session. There was no “spreadsheet” of accounts. No one asked for money or “support” at the dinner.

All of which may be true, but there was a simple way the White House could have avoided what turned into a PR disaster: Hold the “thank you” dinner somewhere else. Didn’t anyone at the White House, from the vaunted “Strategery Office” of Karl Rove on down, see the all-too-easy-to-draw coffee klatsch parallel? It didn’t help that the event wasn’t on Cheney’s public schedule and that the GOP refused to release the names of the attendees.

But why behave as if you had something to hide, especially since Bush received justifiable praise during the campaign for releasing his entire fat-cat contributor list?

The White House’s real answer was the most revealing one. We would never do something so tacky-let alone illegal. Maybe so, but you don’t want to give your enemies any more ammo than they can amass on their own. And here’s something Bush needs to learn about Washington: nobody here ever assumes that you have good intentions. How are politicians reacting to the defection of Senator Jim Jeffords? That depends….

This White House thinks it can decide where to direct its attention-and where not to direct its attention. That’s a good thing: you want a president who is willing to stick to his agenda. But it’s also naive. The president seemed willfully eager to ignore the Middle East, the LaBrea Tarpits of world diplomacy. It was just too complex and too insoluble for him to wade into this early in his new administration.

But Washington isn’t Austin, and you can’t always (or even most of the time) set the agenda on your own, especially where world events are involved. And, for better or worse, the Middle East is a special burden of American leadership.

While Bush deliberately looked elsewhere-to Mexico and Latin America-the situation on the ground in the Middle East deteriorated, creating even more bloodshed and bitterness for him (and Colin Powell) to deal with now.

As for Jeffords, his departure from the GOP may have been inevitable. He was voting with the GOP barely half the time. His state is one of the most liberal in the nation. New England has become, or is becoming, largely Democratic.

But it sure looks like a toxic mix of arrogance and inattention hastened Jeffords’s departure. The small slights-the noninvitation to White House events-didn’t mean much in and of themselves. But they evidently signaled to Jeffords that he was in for constant conflict with this White House. Rather than watch his back every minute, he decided to walk away.

It’s possible in Washington to soothe the friction of ideological conflict with personal relationships, and with the patient search for common ground on issues (and needs) other than the ones that create disputes. But this White House seemed not to try very hard with Jeffords. After he maneuvered to slice $300 billion from the Bush tax bill, he came to be viewed as an enemy. Bush didn’t bother to apply his famous charm on Jeffords.

The attitude was: why bother? But enemy lists are a luxury no White House-especially this one-can afford. That’s especially true in the Senate, where your mortal enemy one day is your best friend the next. And that’s especially true in this Senate, now divided 50-49-1.

It’s true in Washington, as in life. If you treat someone as if they are your enemy, they’re likely to become one.