TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120291/1202100.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.5 KB | 217 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 18

THE WHITE HOUSE

Nervous and Nasty


Bush's feckless efforts to have it both ways on civil rights
and the economy have plunged his Administration into disarray

By DAN GOODGAME/WASHINGTON


    George Bush trusts his gut in foreign policy. He knows
what he wants to do and he does it. But on the home front, the
President fears that his moderate instincts will only land him
in trouble with the Republican conservatives who have distrusted
and dogged him throughout his long career. Thus a hallmark of
Bush's governing style has been his determination to have it
both ways on contentious domestic issues. On civil rights, for
instance, Bush declares himself an opponent of racial hiring
"quotas" reviled by the right. Yet he supports "set-asides" that
reserve a share of federal contracts for women and racial
minorities.

    The President came face to face with that contradiction
last Wednesday evening when he returned to the White House from
a campaign fund-raising dinner. He was scheduled to sign the
compromise Civil Rights Act of 1991 in a major Rose Garden
ceremony the following day. But unbeknown to him, a senior aide
had prepared a directive designed to undermine the spirit if not
the letter of the new law.

    This eleventh-hour rearguard action was launched by C.
Boyden Gray, the White House counsel, who had opposed the bill
from the start. Between 4 and 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Gray
instructed his staff to fax to federal departments an order
that, in Bush's name, "terminated" all government programs that
give preference to racial minorities and women in hiring,
promotion, federal contracting, college admissions and
scholarships. Gray's view that the new law should be blind to
color and sex is popular not only with conservatives but also
with a majority of voters. Yet his position flatly contradicted
both the compromise on the civil rights law that the White House
had reached with Congress and Bush's long-standing support for
affirmative action to overcome discrimination. The civil rights
compromise, according to congressional negotiators from both
parties, was not intended to have any effect on
affirmative-action programs but was designed to make it easier
for women and racial minorities to prove discrimination, while
not forcing employers to hire and promote according to rigid
racial quotas.

    Gray's unauthorized directive was immediately leaked from
the agencies that received it, and angry calls from Capitol
Hill jammed the White House phones. Democrats and moderate
Republicans denounced the directive. It was, said Ralph Neas,
executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights,
"an attempt to gain by Executive fiat what the White House could
not pass through the Congress." A senior White House official
agreed: "Boyden and his staff were just too close to the civil
rights bill, and too many animosities built up. When it was over
and the compromises were made, they still couldn't let it go."

    Moving to quell the protests, Bush irritably ordered Gray
and other White House officials to rewrite the offending
statement and eliminate the challenge to affirmative-action
programs. Yet any good faith that Bush might have won for that
gesture dissipated at the signing ceremony when he declared his
support for a minimalist interpretation of the civil rights law,
entered into the Senate record by Republican leader Robert Dole.
Said a disgusted White House official: "We have managed to
incur the wrath of both the supporters and the opponents of this
bill."

    These flip-flops, like half a dozen others that have
occurred at the White House in recent weeks, grew out of Bush's
persistent efforts to placate conservatives without alienating
moderates. As the civil rights act percolated through Congress,
Bush expressed his opposition to any bill that seemed to
encourage racial hiring quotas. But he did not want to appear
to tolerate job discrimination. Walking that tightrope, Bush
vetoed a version of the act that Congress passed last year,
blasting it as a "quota bill." But the law he signed last week
is essentially the same. By claiming that his exertions had
vastly improved the legislation, Bush in effect retreated while
trumpeting victory.

    Such straddles have often worked for Bush, who as a boy
was nicknamed "Have Half" for his habit of sharing candy bars
with friends. And they have been necessary up to a point,
because Bush's electoral coalition is more ideologically diverse
and volatile than was Ronald Reagan's largely conservative
constituency. But as the economy has soured, Bush's attempts to
split the differences between moderates and conservatives have
infuriated both. Republican pollster Linda DiVall says voters
are dismayed that the resolute and decisive leader of the gulf
war has appeared so uncertain in addressing their economic
worries.

    The Administration's message is the responsibility of the
White House domestic operation, which is stifled by the arrogant
amateurism of chief of staff John Sununu and cannot approach the
savvy of Bush's crack foreign-policy crew. Democratic consultant
Mark Mellman quips that the shift in public attention from
Bush's foreign triumphs to his domestic dithering has
transformed the White House "from the O.K. Corral to Cape Fear."
Examples:

    -- At a political-strategy dinner in early November, Ken
Duber stein, Ronald Reagan's last chief of staff, suggested that
Bush could score political points by bashing banks for charging
high interest rates on credit-card debt. Bush and Sununu
embraced the gimmick and, without consulting other advisers,
inserted it at the last moment into a fund-raising speech Bush
delivered in New York. The Senate liked the idea so much, it
passed legislation that would force down the rates -- and cut
into revenues of many already shaky banks. That action, along
with Bush's faux-populist rhetoric, helped push the Dow Jones
industrial average into a 120-point dive on Nov. 15.

    Sununu vehemently denied responsibility for the remarks,
telling a television interviewer that "the President ad-libbed"
them. That ignited speculation that Sununu was trying to make
the President take the blame for the mistake and that Bush
might move to replace him. But the President confirmed the chief
of staff's account to at least one confidant, though neither he
nor Sununu would say just how the bank-bashing idea made its way
from the political-strategy dinner to the President's lips.
Usually, Sununu takes the heat for unpopular moves or missteps
by the President, which is the main reason Bush is loath to
dismiss him. Another factor is Su nunu's influence in New
Hampshire, where Bush may face a challenge from conservatives
in the first primary.

    -- Bush says, "I'm concerned about the people that are
hurting" and losing their jobs in the recession. Yet in the next
breath he adds, "It's a good time to buy a house." Sounding
eerily like Jimmy Carter in the last phase of his
Administration, Bush often pins blame for the recession on
consumers who are not spending as confidently as they should.
Then he says he wants Americans to save more. Says Bruce
Thompson, a senior Treasury official in the Reagan
Administration and now director of government relations for
Merrill Lynch, "They're all over the map."

    -- The Administration has long maintained that modern
communications allow the President to remain in constant touch
with Washington while he travels the world. But when Bush came
under fire for neglecting the U.S. economy, he and Sununu
abruptly postponed a long-planned trip to Asia because, in
Sununu's words, they didn't want to leave Congress without
"adult supervision." Two weeks later White House press secretary
Marlin Fitzwater was asked whether Bush would push for Congress
to work through the holidays to pass economic legislation. Said
Fitzwater: "They don't need the President to hold them in
session overtime to get them to do something. It's not a
schoolhouse full of kids up there."

    Despised by much of his staff and many G.O.P. lawmakers,
Sununu has drawn most of the blame for the Administration's
foul-ups. Yet the problem really lies with the President. He
bungles domestic policy because he has seldom made clear to his
staff, the Congress or the public precisely where he wants to
go, and by what means, on the economy, civil rights or most
other homegrown issues. Several top Bush aides approvingly quote
pollster Bob Teeter, who for years has urged Bush to "tell
people what you would do if you didn't have a Congress, if you
were a dictator."

    Bush has resisted that advice out of fear that it might
open him to attack from critics on all sides, make it easier to
tell when he has compromised and prevent him from presenting
his capitulations as victories. When Bush does take an
unambiguous stand on a domestic issue, as he did in vetoing a
law that would have allowed low-income women to obtain abortion
counseling at federally funded clinics, it is usually out of
fear of Republican right-wingers.

    Bush is also worried that if he sends any new economic
legislation to Congress, he will only cause the public to hold
him more personally responsible for the recession. Bush fears
that any economic-revival plan he puts forth will be outbid by
the Congress, which will propose some combination of new taxes
on the wealthy and new deficit spending.

    Some of Bush's economic advisers have suggested ways to
finance a stimulative tax cut without increasing the deficit:
for example, through cuts in spending on defense and on Medicare
and farm subsidies for the wealthy. But Bush so far opposes
further defense cuts or any politically explosive fight over
welfare for the well-to-do. Most of his advisers believe that
unless the economy turns sharply downward, Bush will content
himself with rejiggering the "growth package" -- centered on a
cut in capital-gains taxes -- which Congress has failed to adopt
for almost three years. Only if economic growth dips further is
Bush expected to risk proposing a broad-based tax cut for the
middle class.

    Instead, Bush's current economic policy consists mainly of
blaming congressional Democrats for the decline and turning
nastier in his retorts to their criticisms of his failures to
act. The President hopes that approach will pay off when he runs
for re-election. But it is no substitute for a coherent attack
on the nation's economic and social woes.