At Home: No Vision — A Case of Doing Nothing
George Bush has always been more a man of action than introspection. When faced with a complicated problem, he often plunges headlong into physical activity — gunning his speedboat, pitching horseshoes, flailing away on the golf course. It is Bush's way, says an aide, to "drive those demons of indecision out of his mind."
So it was fitting that the hollow center of the President's domestic policy collapsed last Oct. 10 while he was jogging in Florida. Five days earlier, an unlikely coalition of right-wing Republicans and liberal Democrats had revolted in the House of Representatives, scuttling the deficit-cutting budget plan crafted during four months of tortuous negotiations between the Administration and congressional leaders. Only a stopgap continuing resolution kept the government afloat while frenzied efforts to devise a new deal bogged down. The sticking point: Would Bush agree to a Democrat-backed rise in income tax rates for the affluent in exchange for his cherished cut in taxes on capital gains?
For 24 hours, Bush had sown confusion by flipping and flopping on the issue like a beached bluefish. First he signaled that he would accept the swap. Then, under pressure from Republicans who argued that Bush's change of heart would only trigger further Democratic demands, his top aides announced that the deal was no longer acceptable. Now, as he jogged a few laps in St. Petersburg, the time had come for the Commander in Chief to explain himself. Asked by reporters to clarify his stand, Bush opted instead for a snide play on the campaign slogan that had helped get him the job in the first place. "Read my hips," Bush said with a smirk, and jogged on.
Read my hips. Was this any way to lead the most powerful nation on earth?
No, but neither was what the President did during the next 24 hours. Bush reversed himself twice more on the tax issue, completing a quadruple somersault that twisted members of his own party into knots, sent Democrats into orbit and helped cut more than 20 points from his approval ratings in the space of six weeks. That was the most precipitous dive in popularity, absent a major scandal, for any 20th century President.
A Formula for Ruling Forever
At that moment, many Americans concluded that in George Bush they had elected two Presidents: a highly capable captain of foreign policy and a dawdling, disengaged caretaker of domestic affairs. That impression was ! understandable but by no means complete. The shilly-shallying performance on domestic issues that has marked Bush's first two years in office is not the result of ineptitude. It is the consequence of a shrewd calculation made soon after Bush, one of the most ambitious and pragmatic men ever to reach the White House, assumed the presidency.
Shortly after his Inauguration, Bush and his top advisers figured that if the economic and domestic conditions that existed then could be frozen in time, Republicans could hold the White House indefinitely. That led to an obvious conclusion: do as little as possible. "We inherited a situation that was basically A-O.K.," says a senior official. "People were happy with the status quo. No domestic revolution was about to take place. With a few changes here and there, the G.O.P. could rule forever."
It is no coincidence, then, that Bush's highest domestic priority has been to preserve the situation he inherited from Ronald Reagan. Hemmed in, as are Democrats, by budgetary constraints, he has initiated only a handful of new domestic programs. He can claim some genuine progress — passage of the first clean-air legislation since 1977, a new law protecting the rights of the handicapped, and a five-year budget deal that may finally force Washington to start living within its means. But most of these were long overdue or inevitable or were launched out of necessity more than conviction. Bush has devoted far more energy to thwarting Democratic initiatives or amending them in such a way that the Administration could share in the credit. As an official explains, "The key around here has always been stopping the Democrats. If we couldn't stop them, we tried the next best thing: turning the Democratic drive for reforms into G.O.P. alternatives. We wanted to try to turn an apparent political liability into something we could claim credit for."
In Bush's mind, the real business of Presidents is the conduct of foreign policy. He regards the management of domestic affairs merely as an extension of politics, the unpleasant, even silly, things one must do to win an office or keep it. When he delves into homegrown problems, Bush cares less about the issues themselves than their political implications. In foreign affairs the opposite is true: Bush resists pressure to view world events through a political prism, believing that the nation's long-term interests are often better served by sitting quietly instead of rushing to the ramparts.
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.
Accommodating this faction was bound to be tricky, particularly for the son of an aristocratic Republican Senator from Connecticut to whom moderate Republicanism was a kind of birthright. Despite his 14 years in Texas, there was no mistaking Bush's Eastern Establishment roots. His views on foreign policy matched those of the locals well enough — everyone, even Texas Democrats, was staunchly anticommunist. But on domestic affairs, Andover-Yale was not Midland-Odessa. Bush's moderate Republican views on states' rights, civil rights and most social issues clashed with those of the Birchites. As an old friend notes, "Bush was not sitting there asking himself, 'How do we impeach Earl Warren?'"
In 1964, a terrible year for Republicans, Bush lunged for a seat in the U.S. Senate, challenging liberal Democrat Ralph Yarborough. For Bush just to lose respectably required a shift to the right. He called himself a "100%" Goldwater man and lashed out at the 1964 Civil Rights Act, labor unions and the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He lost but garnered more votes than any Republican in Texas history. That won him the notice of Richard Nixon, who campaigned for him in 1966.
Bush later confessed to an Episcopal minister, John Stevens, that he was ashamed of his pandering to the right in 1964. "I took some of the far-right positions I thought I needed to get elected," Stevens recollects Bush saying. "And I regret it. And hope I never do it again."
A Schizophrenic Straitjacket
Of course he did do it again, although not immediately. In 1966 Bush ran for Congress from Houston as a moderate, attacking "extremists" in his own party. "I want conservatism to be sensitive and dynamic," he said, "not scared and reactionary." That led some Republican groups to tag Bush as a liberal and endorse his conservative Democratic opponent, Frank Briscoe. But Bush prevailed, in part because Texas' Seventh District was then one of the state's few Republican strongholds.
Bush nonetheless kept an eye on the right. In 1970, when he gave up his safe seat to run for the Senate against Democrat Lloyd Bentsen, he endured boos and catcalls at nearly every campaign stop because he had supported a fair-housing law in 1968. Bush had indeed said aye to the bill, but only after voting for a procedural amendment that could have killed it. Paul Eggers, who campaigned with Bush that year as the G.O.P. gubernatorial candidate, remembers his teammate's favorite stump-speech line: "If you don't want to vote for me because of open housing, then don't vote for me."
Most didn't. Bentsen won, and Bush spent the next six years working for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in a variety of positions in which his future did not depend on the whims of voters. By 1980 Bush was running for the presidency, at first criticizing his rival Ronald Reagan on economic and foreign policy and then adopting most of Reagan's views once the Californian put him on the G.O.P. ticket. Bush deep-sixed his lament of "voodoo economics" and his support for the Equal Rights Amendment. "Please do not try to keep reminding me of differences I had" with Reagan, Bush pleaded with reporters.
As Vice President, Bush continued to swallow his many objections to Reagan's policies. By 1986, when he began his own race for the White House, Bush had shuffled to the right at the suggestion of his campaign advisers. "He took a lot of heat for it," says one who backed the strategy, "and he didn't like it. But it had the effect of putting enough deposits in those accounts so that we didn't have to worry about them anymore." And in 1988 Bush based his campaign on "no new taxes" and the furlough of convicted murderer Willie Horton, wrapping the whole unsavory package in the American flag. The campaign was so inflammatory that Bush's old hero Barry Goldwater came out of retirement and told him to knock off the foolishness and "start talking about the issues." When he took office, Bush sought to appease conservatives further by selecting a top domestic adviser who could act as a kind of ambassador, fluent in the language, totems and rituals of his party's suspicious right wing. So he chose John Sununu.
The constant care and feeding of the right, says a senior aide, "has given Bush not only an uncertainty about domestic affairs but an alienation from them as well." Body language — often Bush's most candid form of communication — betrays his discomfort with his predicament. Capable of approaching eloquence when he speaks of a "Europe whole and free," Bush delivers domestic speeches that are perfunctory and marred by disingenuous gestures. When he held aloft a bag of crack cocaine obtained after an intricate sting in Lafayette Square across from the White House last year, he broke into an awkward smile, as if to say, "Can you believe I'm doing this?" Says a former adviser: "He's basically embarrassed to be a politician. It's tacky. He has to do these horribly embarrassing things, and he finds it distasteful, except as a competitive exercise."
Catering to the right has also turned the President into something of a political contortionist. Even as he sought to convince Americans that he was a kinder, gentler incarnation of his predecessor, he was straining to appease conservatives by opposing most gun-control efforts and proposing a constitutional amendment against flag burning. By trying to walk simultaneously in opposite directions, he put his presidency in a schizophrenic straitjacket.
From the outset of his Administration, Bush calculated that he could keep his poll numbers up merely by reminding voters that he was aware of America's domestic problems. The White House based this strategy on pollster Robert Teeter's surveys and focus groups, which showed that while Americans were concerned about drugs, education and the environment, they were also deeply suspicious of any federal attempts to solve the problems. Thus Bush promised to be the "education President" and announced some badly needed educational goals last year. But for nearly two years he retained in his Cabinet an Education Secretary, Lauro Cavazos, who, by his own staff's admission, was ineffective. He postponed politically painful choices on energy, housing and transportation policy but has flown to the West Coast twice in 14 months to plant a single tree in the name of environmentalism. Midway through his term, some of his own aides seem weary of the shell game. "You see a lot of blue- ribbon panels and commissions around here," says a staff member. "It's so much easier to do something innocuous than something real."
Even where Bush has made improvements in the American condition, he has worked hard to keep them secret. Though Bush privately regards the budget pact as his greatest domestic achievement to date, he declared in public two months ago that the deal made him "gag." Though Sununu rightly claims that the clean-air legislation "will change America," the chief of staff tried to cancel a public bill-signing ceremony for the landmark measure. When old friends press Bush on this refusal to trumpet his accomplishments, he responds by saying he will ultimately be judged "by deeds, not words." But they suspect that Bush is leery of calling attention to anything that might upset conservatives.
Despite the President's constant wooing, the hard right never seems satisfied. In the aftermath of the budget debacle, a variety of conservative luminaries began clamoring about a possible challenge to Bush in 1992. Though they stand no chance of ousting Bush alone, the right-wingers could help Democrats by sitting on their hands in 1992, narrowing G.O.P. margins in key states. In an attempt to co-opt this volatile faction, Bush will spend the next two years being "against" things conservatives loathe: quotas, taxes, mandated government benefits, anything that can be termed liberal or Democratic. The idea isn't to get anything accomplished; it is to burnish Bush's conservative credentials as he prepares for re-election. Says an official: "There are some things you want to have a fight on."
Quite a few things are worth fighting over, in fact, but all too often Bush has found himself in the wrong corner. On issues like extending opportunities to minorities and cutting the deficit, for example, the President has permitted his indecision and fear of the right to overrule his better instincts. It is a pattern that, in the short term, may get him re-elected in 1992. It is not one that will, as Bush promised in his nomination speech of 1988, "build a better America."