WASHINGTON – Hours after Max Baucus slipped out the back door of Room 216 in the Hart Senate Office Building – in the middle of his committee’s health care deliberations on Sept. 25 – he pulled up a seat at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas next to Jim Messina, President Barack Obama's political fixer for the reform effort.

The meeting had all the makings of a secret out-of-town summit between the point men for the executive and legislative branches on the most ambitious domestic policy overhaul in a half-century.

That, or a quick family reunion.

“He’s like a son to me,” Baucus, the 67-year-old Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said of Messina.

“He’s a father figure to me,” Messina, the 40-year-old White House deputy chief of staff, said of Baucus.

The two Montanans had gathered in the Vegas restaurant Aureole with more than a dozen close friends and family to kick off a weekend 33rd birthday celebration for Baucus’ biological son, Zeno.

But it is the father-son relationship between Baucus and his former chief of staff Messina that matters for people who care about the health care politics that shaped the Finance Committee’s bill and this week’s

$848 billion Senate bill to overhaul the system, not to mention climate change or any other of the many big-ticket items on the Obama agenda that have to pass through Baucus’ committee.

After more than a decade of waging legislative and political battles side by side, the two University of Montana Grizzlies football fanatics have now found themselves facing off on the major issues of the day. Messina’s new job raises the question of how the legislative battles will affect their relationship, but more significant, how their relationship will affect the legislative battles.

Messina acknowledges that his link to Baucus is an asset. “It enables me ... ” he said in a telephone interview this month. He paused, then rushed to note that other White House senior staffers had come up through Capitol Hill. For instance, many senior lawmakers consider Obama senior adviser Pete Rouse the 101st senator, and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel might as well be House speaker-in-waiting, on loan to the West Wing.

“I worked for Max Baucus and the Finance Committee for 15 years,” Messina said. “Does that give me an advantage to give people advice and to find out what’s going on in the Finance Committee with Max? Absolutely.”

Messina stressed, however, that experienced insight, unfiltered channels of communication and unlimited access are good things to have but don’t necessarily translate into influence over Baucus.

“People never say, ‘This is your guy,’ ” Messina said. “I’m Barack Obama’s guy. I’m his deputy chief of staff in the White House.”

The senator agreed with that assessment perhaps more than Messina – or his bosses – might have liked.

“He’s not going to put pressure on me,” Baucus said recently in his Hart Building suite. “Noooo.”

“Lookit,” he continued, gruffly. “Once family, always family, in my outfit. But he’s a professional – a total professional. He’s not going to tell me things he shouldn’t, and it works both ways.”

In Baucus’ waiting room, maps of Montana and pictures of cowboys on horseback hang on the walls above a stack of Montana Outdoors magazines (“Inside: Learning to Love My Bighorn Ewe Tag”).

Baucus greets visitors and walks stiffly to his high-ceilinged inner chamber, painted red and decorated with a “Montana Max” license plate. He takes a seat in an armchair and talks in halting, elliptical sentences about his work and personal life. When discussing Messina, though, a glow comes over his face, as he waxes nostalgic over a montage of Messina-and-me moments.

Baucus recalls that Messina was “very touched” by a rehearsal dinner speech Baucus had delivered before Zeno’s wedding last year, in which the senator said Messina’s new job meant he was losing two sons. It was “Jim’s idea” to give a bottle of colon cleanser to Montana’s junior senator, Jon Tester, on the eve of the colonoscopy he was keeping secret. They used their “take-no-prisoners attitude” to help kill President George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security. They ran incredibly long distances together along the Kim Williams Nature Trail in Missoula. They ate steak and fries every week at Capitol Hill’s Bistro Bis, during which Baucus, whose office announced last year that he and his wife were splitting up, dispensed dating advice. And with paternal pride, he relates that President Obama has called on Messina to start off morning meetings of top advisers, because Messina, Baucus said, is an “upper.”

As long as the bond between Baucus and Messina lives in the realm of personal affinity, the power brokers and their allies are all too happy to share. But the moment the personal drifts into the professional and the specter is raised of the White House’s capitalizing on Messina’s role as Baucus whisperer, everyone balks.

“Jim is someone they would want even absent his relationship and experience with Senator Baucus,” said Peter Scher, a former Baucus chief of staff who became a Clinton administration official. “The fact that Baucus is in the middle of the health care debate, and Jim has a relationship with him, is an added bonus.”

The White House chose Messina to be the emissary to Baucus and his committee when Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary nominee with tax problems, ran into confirmation trouble.

“That was weird, to sit on the other side of the table for the first time with him,” said Messina, adding, “He did his job as oversight, and I did my job to get Secretary Geithner confirmed.”

Then Messina scored another victory inside the White House when he helped urge Baucus to quickly pass the federal stimulus. But those early collaborations may have set up some unrealistic expectations about how quickly health-care reform could pass Baucus’ committee.

This past summer, the White House again tasked Messina to work his former boss, this time on the health care bill before the finance panel. But the legislation lingered as Baucus courted Republican senators such as Iowa’s Charles Grassley, despite the protests of liberals on his committee and White House officials, who suspected the Republicans of passive-aggression. By early September, Obama, who had taken a beating in August town hall harangues, decided enough was enough and took his health care overhaul message over Baucus’ head and to a joint session of Congress.

“It is fair to say that I expressed frustrations with how long it took, but also it’s fair to say that after working for 15 years on the committee, I understood the personalities,” said Messina, who said that Baucus’ response to his urgings to hurry things up was “I’m trying.”

In October, Baucus’ committee eventually passed a health reform bill similar to what Obama had requested in October, with the support of one Republican, Olympia Snowe of Maine. Baucus argued that he continued to play a critical role in the molding of the legislation after it left his committee and entered the jurisdiction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

According to Baucus’ office, the senator continues to hold regular meetings with Finance Committee Democrats, and is constantly on the phone with fellow moderates, including Sens. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, whose votes are critical for Democrats to break a Republican filibuster. Even as Baucus has dealt with other senior White House officials, he has kept a wide-open line of communication to Messina throughout the process, affording the White House a real-time assessment of the deliberations.

And in the beginning of November, the Montana senator reached out to his former aide with a courtesy heads-up: He would be voting against a climate change bill in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that all the Republicans members were boycotting. When he cast his nay vote Nov. 5, he was the only Democrat on the committee to do so.

“The fact is that lots of things have to get done,” said Messina, who remained confident that Baucus would ultimately support comprehensive energy reform when it winds up in Baucus’ panel. “Lots of things go through that committee.”