TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010791/0107993.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 18.8 KB | 365 lines

                                                                                MEN OF THE YEAR, Page 28

AT HOME: NO VISION

A Case of Doing Nothing


Bush's feckless approach to America's ills is no accident, but
a conscious strategy for defending the status quo

By MICHAEL DUFFY


    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."