Last week, when George W. Bush gave his own party a carefully placed thwack--saying the G.O.P. is too often dour, obsessed with wealth and indifferent to the "human problems that persist in the shadow of affluence"--he managed to do a few tricky things at once. He got credit for being warm and caring and optimistic while distancing himself not just from congressional Republicans but from Washington itself--all by trumpeting the success he and other G.O.P. Governors have had reducing crime, welfare dependency and the like. "Something unexpected happened on the way to cultural decline," he said. "Problems that seemed inevitable proved to be reversible."
Among those marveling at the Texas Governor's deft move was the reigning master of deft moves, Bill Clinton. Inside the White House on Wednesday, sources told TIME, the President offered a critique of Bush's speech that included moments of grudging admiration and startled recognition. "He saw himself in Bush," says an adviser. "A whole lot of himself." On Capitol Hill, where House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other G.O.P. bosses were enraged by Bush's words, aides to minority leader Dick Gephardt told Hastert's people, "Get used to it. We've been putting up with this for seven years." Bush called Hastert on Thursday to make nice, sources told TIME; earlier, Bush strategist Karl Rove called Representative Tom Davis, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, to offer Bush's fund-raising help.
As pundits debated whether Bush was trying to move his party to the center or just slapping a happy face on familiar policies, they hauled out the Dick Morris term triangulation, coined by the former Clinton adviser in 1995 to describe the President's strategy of positioning himself above and between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. But Clinton sees Bush's moves as having less in common with triangulation than with Clinton's strategies as a candidate in 1991 and 1992, when he took on the left wing of his party, challenging its hidebound policies on such issues as welfare, taxes and the death penalty. Clinton's "Sister Souljah moment"--rebuking the race-baiting rapper at a meeting of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition--is merely the most famous of these confrontations, all designed to show that Clinton would govern as a new kind of Democrat. And Bush's words are designed to show that he would govern as a new kind of Republican--one who uses conservative principles to help the poor as well as the rich.
"Clinton had to be credible on traditional Republican issues like crime and taxes in order to be taken seriously on the compassion issues he cared most about," says Al From, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Bush, says From, has the same problem in reverse: "He has to be credible on compassion issues in order to have the rest of his agenda taken seriously."