President George Bush signs the 1990 Farm Bill into law. He is joined by (left to right) Senators Richard Lugar, Patrick Leahy and Bob Dole, Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter, and Senators Thad Cochran and Kit Bond
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So though Bush bravely trumpets the promises of a new world order abroad and takes bold steps to bring it about, his top aides blithely admit they have no agenda at home for the next two years. While Bush retains a tight grip on foreign policy decisions, he has virtually abdicated responsibility for domestic affairs to his pugnacious chief of staff, John Sununu, whose attitude toward Congress is marked by contempt. Asked recently what Bush has left to do at home, Sununu replied with a smile, "Not that much."
Even the President concedes that he finds handling foreign policy more "fun" than domestic issues. As he put it the day before his swivel-hips remark, "People really basically want to support the President on foreign affairs, and partisanship does, in a sense, stop at the water's edge. Whereas on domestic policy, here I am with Democratic majorities in the Senate and Democratic majorities in the House, trying to persuade them to do what I think is best. It's complicated."
It is not only complicated but dangerous as well. The U.S. faces a mountain of nagging domestic needs and an abyss of debt. On most of these problems, Bush has been inactive, if not silent. At best, he has tinkered at the margins of America's domestic ills. Rather than battle a national decline that some fear has already begun, Bush is trying only to manage it. Read my hips.
Officials in the Bush Administration offer various rationales for their boss's disdain for domestic affairs: historic developments abroad; divided government at home; truculent Democrats on Capitol Hill; a $3 trillion national debt; unending deficits; constitutional powers that, by allowing the President to brush off Congress, make operating in the foreign policy arena easier and more rewarding.
Good reasons all. But the real explanations may be found in Bush's past. One is his almost pathological fear of the G.O.P.'s right wing, a phobia that dates from his start in politics. The other is a lack of conviction that renders him directionless at home. From his earliest days in politics, he has risen by loyally associating himself with powerful patrons, recasting his views to suit those of the man at the top. As a candidate, he has at one time or another positioned himself as a Goldwater conservative, a moderate mainstream Republican, an effective critic and then staunch supporter of Reaganomics — whatever it took to advance. And all along he has demonstrated a willingness to compromise or jettison his positions to ensure conservative support.
Two weeks ago, Bush stepped back from a 42-year commitment to support for black colleges when he allowed a mid-level Education Department lawyer to challenge the legality of public support for minority scholarships. Many of Bush's aides despaired at their boss's unnecessary capitulation to conservative notions. Says one: "This is one of those few areas where we actually have some convictions, and now it looks like we don't have the courage to stand by them."
Bush is under pressure from the right again, this time to adopt its new "reform" agenda, a campaign for tax cuts and term limits on members of Congress and against affirmative action. While the wisdom of this approach is under intense debate at the White House, there are indications that Bush may try to mollify the right for two more years, even if that means returning to the racially divisive themes that helped elect him in 1988.
A Yalie Goes To Texas
Old habits die hard. In 1948, when Bush, then 24, moved his family into the heart of the oil-rich Permian Basin, Texas was a two-party state: liberal Democrats and conservative "Tory" Democrats. Republicans just weren't in the picture. "If you were a Texas Republican in the 1950s," recalls Don Rhodes, an old Bush friend who now works as a personal aide to the President, "you didn't let anybody know it." When Bush organized his first Republican precinct primary, in Midland in the early '50s, only three people showed up during 12 hours of voting — the future President, his wife Barbara and a lone Democrat who, Bush later wrote, "stumbled into the wrong polling place."
For a budding Republican politician, this was a discouraging situation. And if being in so tiny a minority wasn't embarrassing enough, the minority itself was. The nascent Texas G.O.P. was made up of farmers and ranchers and a group of newer city dwellers whose numbers and affluence were growing along with the Lone Star State's gas and oil interests. And then there were "the crazies," a small but noisy claque of John Birch Society regulars who never controlled the party but kept it off balance for years with their ultra-right stands and defeatist tactics. Though they were gradually eclipsed during the 1960s, the crazies didn't go quietly. In 1960 one group roughed up Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in a celebrated incident at Dallas' Adolphus Hotel. In 1968 another ! group criticized a Republican candidate for appearing with his arm around a black football player.