WASHINGTON – With his second term not yet under way, President Bush declared yesterday he has already begun the process of designing private Social Security accounts.

He said he would waste no time in moving aggressively on his campaign promises – many of which were strenuously opposed by his Democratic challenger, Senator Kerry, and nearly half of the national electorate.

“I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” Mr. Bush said at a press conference.

His decisive, albeit slim, victory at the polls was a vindication of his conservative policy agenda, Mr. Bush said.

“When you win there is a feeling that people have spoken and embraced your point of view,” he said.

After a bitterly divisive campaign, Mr. Bush called on Americans of all political stripes to unite around the war on terror and reforming the intelligence system.

“There is a common ground to be had when it comes to a foreign policy that says the most important objective is to protect the American people and spread freedom and democracy,” he said.

“Whatever our past disagreement, we share a common enemy,” he said.

The policy priorities he outlined, however, promise to generate opposition from Democrats: overhauling the Social Security system and the tax code, and limiting the legal liability of medical professionals found to have committed malpractice.

Although he pledged to work with whoever shared his goals, Mr. Bush described himself as “more seasoned” and “wisened” about the limited potential for bipartisan cooperation.

“One of the disappointments of being here in Washington is how bitter this town can become and how divisive. I’m not blaming one party or other, it’s just the reality of Washington, D.C.,” the president said. He accused the press of exacerbating divisions for the sake of “sport.”

Despite being carried to victory in part by the support of religious conservatives, Mr. Bush said he did not expect the country to become divided over religion, and said people who do not worship “are just as patriotic” as their neighbors who do.

“I will be your president regardless of your faith, and I don’t expect you to agree with me, necessarily, on religion. As a matter of fact, no president should ever try to impose religion on our society,” he said.

Asked whether he would seek a consensus candidate for the Supreme Court if there is an opening, Mr. Bush said he would pick judges who know “the difference between personal opinion and the strict interpretation of the law.”

He said he would choose the kind of person he had nominated to federal courts – though several of his nominations have been held up by Senate Democrats who disagreed with their judicial philosophies or took issue with their records.

A day after suggesting that the president should not nominate excessively conservative judges, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said yesterday he planned “to work well” with Mr. Bush in the judicial confirmation process and to end the Democrats’ ability to delay votes on the nominees.

Mr. Bush said he was heading to Camp David yesterday to begin the process of thinking of new appointments – the attorney general, John Ashcroft, has been reported to be planning to resign – but had “made no decisions” on replacing members of the Cabinet or White House staff who would be departing.

Mr. Bush said he would look for people who would not be intimidated by the Oval Office.

“You need people to walk in on those days when you’re not looking so good and saying, “You’re not looking so good, Mr. president,'” he said.

In a rare glimpse of his private life, Mr. Bush described watching election returns come in at 3:30 in the morning with his father, whom he eventually instructed to “go to bed.” He said that he invited his father to join him the next morning in the Oval Office, but that the former president departed before seeing his son declared the winner of a second term in the White House – a political achievement that President Clinton denied him in 1992.

“It wasn’t clear at that point in time, so I never got to see him face-to-face to watch his, I guess, pride in his tired eyes as his son got a second term,” Mr. Bush said.

As of yesterday, he said, father and son had not had “a chance to really visit and, you know, embrace,” Mr. Bush said.

The president acknowledged he would need to work with Democrats to pass a reform of Social Security, which would include transferring a portion of payroll taxes into private savings accounts.

“I’m not sure we can get it done without Democrat participation, because it is a big issue,” Mr. Bush said.

He acknowledged yesterday that the transition would be expensive.

“There are going to be costs. But the cost of doing nothing … is much greater than the cost of reforming the system today,” he said.

Mr. Bush said he would like to follow the recommendations of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security, a 16-member panel established in 2001, of which Senator Moynihan was co-chairman.

The commission outlined three proposals that involved diverting between 2 percent and 4 percent of taxable wages into private accounts that could be invested in stock-market funds, rather than have all the payroll taxes go into the Social Security fund, which holds government bonds.

“It’s awesome. We’re excited,” said the executive director of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, Derrick Max. The organization backs changes in Social Security.

Mr. Bush also conveyed the outlines of a nascent internal policy discussion over how best to simplify the tax code. He said there would be a debate over how to eliminate “loopholes” for special-interest groups, while maintaining what he called “very important” incentives for charitable giving and mortgage payments. In addition, he said his tax reform proposals would be “revenue neutral,” meaning total tax revenues would not go up or down.

Reform of the tax code will entail “a lot of legwork” before a legislative package will be ready to present to Congress, he said.

He continued to maintain that the deficit would be cut in half within five years. Eliminating the deficit will require “fiscal restraint” by Congress and would benefit from increasing tax revenues from a growing economy, he said.

Mr. Bush also said, though, that he will be asking for more, yet-unspecified funds for military operations in Iraq. He said he had not yet sat down with the secretary of defense to talk about how many troops will need to be deployed in Iraq to provide security during elections planned for the new year. He said the administration would respond to the requests of military commanders on the ground, but he said he had not yet had a request for more troops.

Not mentioned among his list of priorities were protecting a definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, passing a new energy policy, or renewing the Patriot Act.

The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, said the president “now has a clear mandate and a majority in the House and Senate with which to implement that mandate.”

Already, though, some of the president’s critics started to gear up to fight his policies.

The American Civil Liberties Union announced it would “redouble” its efforts to fight the renewal of the Patriot Act, the administration’s detention policies, and the channeling of federal funds to religious groups.