Some treat her with a filial affection, some with cautious deference, and some try timidly to engage her in debate; tonight the hot topic is a report her new firm has been commissioned to do--and will present tomorrow--about why the state should fund a medical school for the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Government insider: Arduin, center, with her former boss Jeb Bush, left, and lobbyist Dave Ericks

© Gerlinde/Michael, Hollywood, Fla.

"Why not just make a satellite of UF?" a lobbyist asks her.

"All the research dollars and professors will go to the main campus."

"So why not try to build up Gainesville?"

"Well," she says, "no one wants to be in Gainesville." Then, with a soft poke at the city's better-known staples, she adds, "except professors and horses."

Arduin has a long face, dark eyes, and a short, round nose. She is thin and fit, a strong woman who can be delicate in manner when she needs to be. Her cheeks are rosy, and her features are as soft as her voice, so the decidedly unpopular decisions she delivers come out like powdered sugar. "When you think of someone who's managed four state budgets, your first thought is not her, it's George Schultz, or me, some graybeard," says Arthur Laffer, the well-known supply-side economist who's been advising U.S. presidents since Nixon and is now a partner in Arduin's firm. "But what you see is a young, attractive, aggressive woman. It's not central casting." Arduin's charm not only tempers what her critics would characterize as her dearth of fiscal generosity, it also gives her something of an Ann Coulter esteem in Republican circles. She's respected and adored, even though she's made herself the fat-camp counselor of pork-barrel spending--and she knows where the kids hide the candy bars.

On Tuesday morning at 5:00, Arduin's mind is already moving at 100 miles an hour. As if today's presentation wasn't enough pressure, she sits on the board of Centracore Properties Trust (CPT), a $200-million company that's just entered crisis mode. The company leases correctional facilities to operators like the GEO Group Inc., which issued a statement yesterday that it did not plan to renew its lease with CPT. Investors interpreted the announcement as a vote of no-confidence, and, by the closing bell, CPT shares had taken an 11 percent hit. Arduin's pretty sure she knows what's going on: GEO is trying to sink CPT's stock price so it can gobble up enough shares to take over the company.

By 8:00, she's in the Mercedes, whirring south, downloading e-mail and answering calls, simultaneously tweaking today's presentation and coordinating CPT's next move. She gets on the phone with Jeannie Woodford, California's director of state prisons. "I wanted to see if you were interested ..." Arduin leads without a drop of desperation. The plan is to persuade California to lease the prisons directly from CPT, cut out GEO, and "announce it now," to pump the stock back up before GEO can afford to buy a controlling share. There's already been a lot of movement on the stock, and it's fallen steadily from $28. By day's end, shares will be trading at $19.

Still a few hours from Orlando, Arduin conducts business as she travels through the part of north Florida where Motel Six billboards boast of AARP discounts and a cartoon blonde on a road sign beckons passersby to Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede. Arduin points out a sign that says "Ten, Twenty, Life," a zero-clemency initiative she worked on with Jeb Bush. "If you use a gun in a crime, you get ten years automatically," Arduin says. "If you shoot it, you get twenty. If you kill someone, you get life. Part of the deal with Democrats was that we had to advertise so people knew about the law." A few miles later, the Mercedes passes a billboard advertising a retail firearms outlet.

Today's meeting is with the editorial board of the Orlando Sentinel, which has run some negative press on the plans for the new medical school. Arduin's team needs to sell the editors on their economic-impact analysis to generate some positive publicity.

Arduin conducts the meeting by varying the warmth of her smile; she's as frugal and deliberate with her words as she once was with the state's checkbook. She has a way of making her smile seem stern, and she uses it along with a few soft-spoken words and a nod to refocus the conversation when it strays off course. In this manner she weaves UCF President John C. Hitt's enthusiasm for the project into economist Perry Wong's mastery of regional economics, manufacturing a convincing argument while deftly curtailing a meeting participant's tendency to stray, as if it were a line-item extravagance.

Donna Arduin's intellectual awakening came during the prosperous years of the Reagan administration, which she observed from the viewpoint of a wide-eyed undergraduate. The idea that you could manufacture your own success story if you worked hard enough hit home--growing up in Midland, Michigan, Arduin was a living Horatio Alger story. Her father was a high-school basketball coach who took a second job to send his three kids to prep school, and Arduin had to win multiple scholarships and juggle a grab bag of jobs to put herself through Duke. "I have no sympathy for people who want handouts from the government," she says. And it's not because she's bitter that she had to work so hard to get by. It's because she's not.

When her professors would criticize her class for lacking the fervor the previous generation channeled into protests and demonstrations, Arduin took exception. "Life's pretty good," she would say. "I don't really have anything to protest." Arduin was by no means wealthy; it's just that, to her, the supply-side economics of "the real president" seemed to be working pretty well. And, as a public-policy and economics major, she saw that the market handled things better than the government, that taxes kept money out of consumers' hands where it belonged, and that private-sector spending was better than government spending. Arduin was beginning to develop her allegiance to the Republican Party.

Right out of Duke, Arduin went to work as an analyst for Morgan Stanley in New York and Tokyo. She stayed with Morgan Stanley for seven years, until Patti Woodworth, who was director of Michigan's Office of Management and Budget and who had given Arduin a summer internship during college, lured her back to Michigan to work as her deputy. After one term under Governor John Engler, Arduin followed Woodworth to New York and served as deputy budget director under Governor George Pataki. The next stop was Florida.

Today Arduin's loyalties are more complex than cut-and-dried conservatism, but her libertarian ideals align her with the party of Lincoln on more than just fiscal issues. However, after thirteen years of the kind of seasoning that comes from being dogged by relentless reporters, she's reluctant to speak out on issues she's not in a position to influence--and impervious to penetrating questions about some of the more sensitive social issues politicians must confront today.