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Knowing that Republican conservatives didn't trust him, Bush wooed them assiduously. Sometimes his obsequiousness was comical: until confronted with taped evidence, Bush denied having said Reagan's supply-side nostrums represented "voodoo economics." Sometimes it was dispiriting: Bush changed his positions on issues like abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment in order to conform to Reagan's views. His most blatantly fawning behavior, like saluting Jerry Falwell ("America is in crying need of the moral vision you have brought to our political life") and praising William Loeb, the New Hampshire publisher who had belittled him, caused critics to wonder about Bush's "corruption of ambition." Even George Will, one of the conservatives whose support Bush most coveted, was repelled. "The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another," wrote Will, "is a thin, tiny 'arf' -- the sound of a lapdog."
Defensively, Bush's "big decision," said Richard Williamson, a longtime Reagan aide, "was to salute the flag. When the Administration jumped, Bush jumped too." Shortly after Reagan-Bush won in 1980, the Vice President told key staffers that he would keep his head down and his mouth shut. "I'm not going to operate like Mondale," an aide recalls Bush saying. "I'm not going to leak my differences with policies that are unpopular. No one's going to catch me trying to cover my ass that way." And no one ever did. By the end, even some of Bush's oldest friends fretted. "He's submerged his own views," said former Maryland Senator Charles Mathias. "The question is whether they have survived and will they surface?"
"But it all worked, didn't it?" says Richard Bond, a longtime Bush aide who helped mastermind the President's election. "George Bush is one of the most underestimated men in politics. The key to him is that he has learned to keep his eye on the ball. He's learned that getting there requires that you sometimes swallow hard in order to later be in a position to do the things you want to do. The real way to view Doonesbury's line about Bush having put his manhood in a blind trust is to see it as a masterful act of political calculation and an extraordinary example of self-discipline."
So keeping his eye on the ball has finally got Bush "there." Getting to the next step -- re-election in '92 and then to a consensus verdict that he has been an effective President -- is going to require an even more disciplined devotion to competence over ideology. For although Bush has said, "We're coming in to build on the proud accomplishments of the past, ((not)) to correct ((its)) ills," a failure to redress the Reagan era's greatest ill could consign this President to political oblivion. Ironically, given his insistence that the key lesson to be learned from Reagan is that a successful President takes "a principled position and stays with it," Bush's own success may depend on yet another 180 degrees turn: the far more difficult task of abandoning a cardinal promise while keeping the Teflon intact.