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Almost heretically, given the Republican Party's current center of gravity, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft has moved his boss to the center by calling him a "Rockefeller Republican." To the Republican right, those are fighting words. So repugnant was Nelson Rockefeller's pragmatic moderation that they forced him from Gerald Ford's ticket in 1976. "Look at most of the ((Bush)) Cabinet and White House staff," says George Clark, the former New York State Republican leader who supported Reagan in 1980 against the preferences of the state party's dominant Rockefeller wing. "The more I see and read -- and I hope I'll come to think I'm just joking -- the more I think we should get ready to primary ((i.e. challenge)) Bush in '92."
Before then, Bush will have four years to entrench himself, and the significant difference between the new President and his predecessor was actually highlighted months ago. In his Inaugural, Reagan reiterated the basic tenet of his political philosophy: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." In accepting the presidential nomination last August, Bush stated his view, sublimated for eight years, in five words: "I do not hate government."
Bush's "liberation" (as he put it in an interview with TIME) was on full display as the transition played out. The entire week, not merely the Inaugural, was carefully choreographed. "This is the week," said White House chief of staff John Sununu, "designed to set the tone for governing." The difference in tone was immediately apparent. On the Sunday-night television program 60 Minutes, Reagan once again disparaged civil rights leaders for "doing very well ((by)) keeping alive the feeling that they're victims of prejudice." The next day Bush attended a prayer breakfast honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Bush opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and once called King a "militant," but now he hailed the civil rights champion as a "great gift from God."
From there, Bush "shared" the disabled's "dreams of full participation" in society, and then promised a group of schoolteachers that "education will be on my desk and on my mind from the start, every day." At yet another gathering, he said the country should "work together to bring light to shine on all of God's children," a notion revisited movingly in the Inaugural when he charged the nation to help "the homeless," the "children who have nothing and those who cannot free themselves of enslavement to whatever addiction -- drugs, welfare, demoralization -- that rules the slums."
Symbols all. But something else was going on last week, something of substance and paramount importance: the beginning of what may be an exquisitely orchestrated retreat. The flip side of "kinder, gentler" is embodied in Bush's famous campaign pledge, "Read my lips: no new taxes," a politically expedient stance that helped him win election and now threatens his ability to govern successfully. "Backing off that promise could destroy his presidency," says a senior Administration official. "But we'll probably have to do just that. How we do it without making the President out to be a liar or an incompetent weakling is going to take all of George Bush's skills. The shiftiness required to get out of that box is going to make everything he's done to get here seem like child's play."