TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/073090/0730640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 130 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 72

The Leadership Thing


By Richard Brookhiser


    In a dozen subtle ways, George Bush has spent the past year
and a half distancing himself from Ronald Reagan. His White
House press room is used for press conferences, not games of
hide-and-seek; his First Lady prefers gardening in slacks to
hostessing in a designer dress. Even the phrase "kinder,
gentler" was a covert, backward-looking rebuke: Kinder and
gentler than who?

    There have to be a few Bushmen, along about now, who are
wondering if the process of de-Reaganization hasn't gone too
far. With the tax switch clinging to their cheeks like the
remnants of a burst globe of bubble gum, they must be asking
themselves, Would the Gipper ever have got into such a mess?

    Of course he wouldn't. Reagan got into different kinds of
messes, but his leadership style precluded embarrassments quite
like this one.

    The Reagan style was made up of three elements, the first
and most obvious located at the point where warmth intersects
rhetoric. Reagan's rhetoric was crafted by flacks, and the
warmth may not have warmed anyone within actual touching
distance, apart from Nancy, but from a podium or in front of
a lens, the combination was overpowering. Reagan, said Tip
O'Neill in a moment of frustration, could win an election with
the votes of a group of bankrupt farmers. O'Neill, no mean
blarneyer himself, was paying homage to a master.

    What energized that compelling performance was the fact that
the performer had something to say. Critics mocked The Speech,
that cargo of truisms worn to stream-bed smoothness after
decades of delivery, but the solidity, and the consistency, of
Reagan's basic message acted as political ballast when many
another career capsized.

    It helped, finally, that Reagan turned out to be right about
so many things. He cut tax rates, in the teeth of predictions
that the sky would fall, and it's still over our heads. For
half a century he disliked communism -- no more, it turns out,
than Chinese students, Lithuanian voters or many of Mikhail
Gorbachev's advisers.

    In the day-to-day world of politics, the fusion of style,
conviction and prescience had the paradoxical effect of giving
Reagan flexibility. When Reagan seized the opportunity, late
in his second term, to negotiate American intermediate-range
missiles out of Europe, he provoked far less anguish among his
movement conservative supporters than Richard Nixon did when
he went to China. Reagan, unlike Nixon, had a reserve fund of
trust, and he drew on it. A more pertinent example of a low-cost
Reagan switch comes from his days as Governor of California.
Reagan, as part of his general opposition to high taxes,
believed that taxpaying should be an obvious and unpleasant
activity -- "Taxes should hurt" was a favorite slogan -- and
he was therefore opposed to state income tax withholding, a
position on which, he said, "my feet are in concrete." When,
after a few years in Sacramento, he found that the state could
not generate a livable cash flow unless withholding was
instituted, he unlocked himself -- and announced the change by
saying "the sound you hear is the concrete around my feet
cracking." Supporters saw the switch not as a defeat or a
betrayal, but as a maneuver that was necessary to fight and win
another day. So did Reagan, who returned to the tax issues at
the end of his second term as Governor (unsuccessfully) and his
first term as President (successfully).

    Bush has none of these qualities. His rhetoric is small
timbre, a church-basement upright, not a concert grand. He is
identified with no lifelong, strongly held principles or
prejudices. And since he hasn't been telling us the same thing
for years on end, he can't have the pleasure of telling us now,
"I told you so."

    Bush's strength as a public figure has always resided
elsewhere. In Looking Forward, his campaign autobiography, he
told the story of the Yale headgrounds keeper who, after weeks
of watching Bush swinging and missing in the batter's box,
wrote him a note: "I am convinced the reason you are not
getting more hits is because you do not take a real cut at the
ball. If you would put more power behind your swing, you would
improve your batting average 100%." Bush added that he took the
advice, and brought his average up over .250. This story has
been retold as a goof on Bush: no bat then, no oomph now. But
it cuts two ways, for Bush put in the work and did improve
himself.

    This quality of earnest effort has been Bush's long suit.
He may not always know what to do, and he may never know how
to say what he knows. But once he resolves to do something, he
plugs away.

    Such a public personality is especially vulnerable to the
kind of failed smart-guy trick the change on tax policy
represents. Bush cannot say that as a longtime antitax
ideologue he has nevertheless decided to take one step back in
order to go two steps forward. He does not have the cushion of
principle to fall back on. All he had was a pledge, and the
character of a man who kept his pledges. Now he has welshed on
the pledge and is in danger of losing the character.

    Bush is doubly vulnerable to conservative disgruntlement.
The Congressmen and pundits who are so unhappy now were never
tied to him by the mystic chords of memory, as they were to
Reagan, though they were willing to be pleasantly surprised.
Now they have been unpleasantly confirmed in all their old
doubts. This matters to Bush because they, not George Mitchell
or Tom Foley, form the core of his support.

    Though the Democrats will certainly profit by Bush's
discomfiture, whether they will be able to build some positive
political advantage upon it is another question. (We are not
talking about the most cunning people on earth.) The popular
estimate of Bush may stay high. But it's peaked because he's
changed, and the only way from here, for the estimate and the
man, is down.