TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=92TT1901> <title> Aug. 24, 1992: Warrior for the Status Quo </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 Aug. 24, 1992 George Bush: The Fight of His Life </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> COVER STORIES, Page 32 PRESIDENT BUSH Warrior for the Status Quo </hdr><body> In an excerpt from their new book, TIME's White House correspondents depict George Bush as a deeply practical man who decided that what he most wanted to do in his first term was win a second term By Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame [From Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush by Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, published by Simon & Shuster. (c) 1992 by Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame.] Some obvious questions awaited George Bush on Wednesday, Nov. 9, 1988, his first day as President-elect of the United States of America. What were his plans? Would he move quickly to make good on his vows to clean up the nation's skies, fully fund Head Start and broaden opportunities for disabled Americans? How would he persuade lawmakers to go along with such proposals after a campaign of ugly attacks on Democrats and considerable Congress bashing? How would Bush's kinder and gentler promises mesh with his oaths to halt regulatory red tape, rein in the Federal Government and reduce the deficit? How would Bush do all that and still uphold his "no new taxes" pledge? Appearing before reporters that morning, Bush was asked to describe his mandate. He replied, "Well, I don't know whether I want to use the word mandate...I would simply say the people have spoken, the verdict was clear, and therefore I will take what I think the prime issues of the campaign were and work constructively with Congress to attain the will of the people." Bush was forecasting a great deal when he eschewed the word mandate. His campaign had been a bewildering fugue of mixed messages designed to hold together an unlikely coalition of mainstream Republicans, activist conservatives, Reagan Democrats and independent suburbanites. Bush won with a coalition whose demands were so contradictory that it would prove almost impossible to govern. But then a mandate had never been Bush's objective. Getting elected was. He had assembled a coalition not to govern, but simply to acquire the 270 electoral votes he needed to win the presidency. It was only a matter of weeks after Bush's Inauguration that his aimless style began to worry many of his aides. Bush, they complained, was flitting around from St. Louis to South Korea to South Carolina without communicating a clear sense of his priorities to the country or even to his staff. Only six weeks into his term, Bush felt obliged to call a press conference to deny that his Administration suffered from "drift." In fact, Bush did have a strategy, and John Sununu, his chief of staff, revealed its essence during a fractious staff session in his big corner office on the evening of March 6, 1989. That meeting, unusual amid the informal, walk-in-anytime atmosphere of the Bush White House, was called at the urging of a group of senior officials, who for weeks had been telling one another, in whispered asides and computer-mail messages, that the President was being badly served by his scattershot planning. Several senior aides recommended that the White House agree on a set of legislative priorities and political messages and pursue them single-mindedly over the next several months: coordinating Bush's travel, speeches, meetings and--especially--TV news coverage, in a theme-of-the-week, line-of-the-day routine. Hearing this, Sununu erupted, "No! No! Government doesn't work that way!" What he meant was that George Bush wouldn't work that way. Weekly themes, Su nunu insisted, were "too confining, too cumbersome" to suit Bush's peripatetic personality or the political constraints that he had inherited. Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan, did not have a Republican-controlled Senate, effective control of the House or a clear mandate from the voters to accomplish any specific, big-ticket reforms. Sununu then provided his aides what they needed: not a set of domestic priorities so much as a political strategy and a way of understanding what Bush was up to. What was the single, overriding goal of the Bush Administration? Su nunu's answer: a "successful presidency" that would bring re-election in 1992. Next question: How can the Bush Administration best ensure that the voters judge it a success? The answer: by putting together a solid record of accomplishment on which to campaign in 1992; a checklist of bills passed that major constituencies would applaud, of bills vetoed that other constituencies--particularly conservatives--had despised; and a tally of presidential actions taken, crises handled, opportunities seized. Sununu referred to this presidential platform in the making as "talking points." Here, finally, was "the vision thing": the image Bush saw when he imagined a better future for America was...himself in the Oval Office through January 1997! Silly as it might sound, this revelation proved useful as "an organizing principle," in the recollection of one senior official present at the meeting, and "gave us a quiet, internal coherence" that had been missing until then. Bill Kristol, the chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, later explained that Sununu "had us think of the record that we'd like the President to run on in 1992 and work backward from there." This approach offered another advantage, which Sununu described as "tactical flexibility"--a nimbleness, unencumbered by sticky specific goals or principles, that would allow Bush to quickly seize political opportunities as they arose. During the 1988 campaign, Bush committed himself to as few specific policies as possible, believing that such undertakings would confine him after the election. After Bush took office, his reluctance to commit himself only grew stronger and gained an additional rationale: laying out to the public a clearly defined agenda would make it more difficult for Bush to shift his attention to unexpected crises and opportunities, at home and abroad, that offered bigger political payoffs. Budget Director Richard Darman made this point to his colleagues at the March 6 meeting, in words that nicely prefigured the entire term: "Remember, much of how a President is going to be evaluated is how he handles surprises, not necessarily how he handles his own agenda." BUSH THE REGULAR JOE Americans sensed that they had elected a different sort of President when George Bush let it slip that he showered with his dog. This was something new: an emperor who admitted that he (at least for a few minutes every morning) had no clothes. The disclosure was not as startling as it might have been. Bush, America knew, or would soon learn, owned a bowling ball. He hated broccoli. He had trouble finishing his sentences. He had a fancy estate at Kennebunkport, Maine, which had been in his family for generations, but he ran errands to town and invited just about everyone to lunch. He preferred country to classical music. The anecdotes about Bush's "normal" habits tumbled forth from White House staffers like so many talking points. The message was obvious: the President is a regular Joe. "This is the first normal guy to hold this office in 25 years," a senior official said. Some of those habits were not quite as advertised. During the 1988 campaign, Bush injected more of a Texas twang into his voice. "Fair" became a two-syllable word. He no longer intended an action; he was "fixin' to" do it. Bush did not excise all fancy words from his vocabulary, but he did spell them out syllable by syllable, as if reading them for the first time. Even "ed-jew-cay-shun" got this aw, shucks treatment. He had his picture taken throwing horseshoes rather than playing golf or tennis. Campaign officials discouraged photos of the Bush spread in Kennebunkport. The owner of an expensive speedboat and an avid angler for the exotic bonefish of the Florida Keys, Bush now emphasized his love of fishing for the humble largemouth bass and attended the Bass Masters exhibition in Alabama. He also let it be known that he liked to unwind with a beer (domestic, of course) and a big bag of pork rinds. As soon as he was elected, Bush dropped most of his working-class affectations. It turned out that his favorite snack was not pork rinds but popcorn, and beer gave way to vodka martinis (on the rocks with lots of olives) and white wine. Bush once again strapped his watch to a striped-cloth band that had been banished during the campaign as too preppy. He similarly resumed wearing shirts with white collar and cuffs over striped or pastel-colored bodies: "what Roger calls my `elitist shirts,'" Bush joked in a reference to his savvy campaign adman and image adviser, Roger Ailes. Bush's eight years at Reagan's side taught him a great deal about how to be President and about how not to be President. He learned that a well-liked Commander in Chief, which Reagan was for most of his two terms, would be forgiven many a political gaffe or unpopular policy initiative. Bush also learned that a President who promised too much, who raised expectations for sweeping change, would, like Reagan, in the end be seen to fall short of the mark. So Bush set out to endear himself to the American public while at the same time working to lower its expectations both of him and of his presidency. To the task, Bush brought something special: an ironic, self-mocking approach to the job. He went through the motions of being President that tradition dictated, but often with his tongue planted in his cheek. He once gathered his advisers in the Oval Office, placed a crystal ball on his desk and widened his eyes over the orb as a photographer snapped the picture with a Polaroid. (An aide later forwarded the snap to a reporter, saying, "The President wanted you to know how he really makes decisions.") Film actress Melanie Griffith recalls standing on the road outside her home in Aspen, Colorado, and watching the President's motorcade go by one day in August 1990. In fact, it wasn't just any day; it was Aug. 2, 1990--the day after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. But Bush, seeing Griffith, stopped his car, activated the special speaker in the rear of his limousine--Bush calls this device "Mr. Microphone"--and barked at Griffith's one-year-old daughter, "What's the matter, Dakota? Never seen a talking car before?" Bush invited Dana Carvey, whose Saturday Night Live imitations of the President were frighteningly convincing, to the White House. There, during a 15-minute Oval Office chat, Bush and Carvey stood in front of the fireplace and talked simultaneously at each other, one being Bush, the other doing Bush. When Carvey began chopping the air with one hand and talking about "Daaaan Quaaaayle--getting stronger, learning ev-er-y daaay," Bush doubled over in laughter. This downsizing of the presidency served a dual political purpose: Americans came to like Bush and to expect less of him. It was as if to say, "Like me? Trust me." And it was hard not to like a man who, surrounded by grim-faced Secret Service agents, howled with laughter when he played the $20-bill-on-the-end-of-a-string trick on unsuspecting waiters at the Chinese embassy; who would greet visitors to the Oval Office by placing a windup mechanical bumblebee on the floor and letting it buzz around; who walked around the White House with a voice-activated stuffed monkey that socked itself on the head whenever the Commander in Chief began to talk. As Bush's old friend from Yale, Thomas ("Lud") Ashley, liked to say, "It's easy to underestimate George Bush because he's so damned genteel and nice." BUSH THE LOYALIST In looking for a chief of staff, Bush wanted a bad cop and one who was loyal to him alone. Bush had watched his friend Jim Baker, as Reagan's chief of staff, privately blame the Commander in Chief for much of what went wrong and take the credit for most of what went right. Bush was determined to find a more selfless chief of staff, and thus picked John Sununu, the deeply conservative New Hampshire Governor who had saved Bush's flagging presidential bid by helping him win his state's primary. Bush deployed Sununu as a double-sided human shield, whom liberals would blame for taking a moderate Administration hostage and to whom conservatives would turn when the President abandoned their causes. Sununu ran interference when Bush needed to shuffle to the right on such issues as judicial appointments or abortion, absorbing the blame of Bush's latest pander to his party's extremist wing. But because his ties to conservatives were so strong, Sununu could mollify the powerful G.O.P. faction when the President needed to veer back to the middle on taxes and fiscal questions. "Sununu took all the arrows," explained an aide, "and Bush got all the credit." While Sununu seldom exceeded his brief from Bush, his style was gratuitously insulting. He made enemies that neither he nor Bush needed. Nor did Sununu realize that by treating people maliciously, he ceased to get the best out of them; once burned by Sununu, most Republicans and White House aides just stopped saying anything or making suggestions. It wasn't until Sununu flew afoul of White House travel rules in May 1991 that Bush realized how few friends his obnoxious chief of staff had. Bush began to nudge Sununu out just before Thanksgiving 1991. Moving with characteristic stealth, Bush dashed off an identical note to seven or eight longtime political allies asking for their "advice" about the upcoming campaign. He sealed the notes in White House envelopes and passed them to his son George. The younger Bush inserted the letters in larger plain brown envelopes bearing his return address in Dallas. He followed up with telephone calls, speaking individually with each of the outside advisers. The response to the secret letters was nearly unanimous: the recipients reported that they'd love to work in the 1992 campaign but could not imagine doing so if Sununu would retain authority over the campaign as chief of staff. As one member of the high command put it later to another, "I'm not working for that little son of a bitch." On the day before Thanksgiving, sounding more like a Dutch uncle than an executioner, the younger Bush tried to break it to Sununu gently in the chief of staff's office. "You know, I've talked to a lot of people. They're down on you. It's going to be tough for you to work with these people. I've got to tell my father, and you've got to talk to him about it." George W. delivered his heave-ho but left the session doubtful that he had accomplished his mission. Indeed, Sununu concluded that he still had some wiggle room left and went to see Bush, who told him to come to Camp David that Sunday. When Sununu arrived he surprised Bush by fighting for his job. "I can survive this thing," he told Bush. "I can work through it." The Commander in Chief couldn't bring himself to cut the umbilical cord. Having relied on Sununu to do his dirty work, Bush discovered that there was no one around to ax the hatchet man. So Bush again demurred, postponing his next move for another day. "Let's think about it. Let's talk tomorrow." On the morning of Monday, Dec. 2, Sununu tentatively offered to resign, thinking Bush would reject it. Bush's response seemed vague: "Let me see what we ought to do," he said, "how we can handle it." Sununu didn't get it at first, but within an hour he realized that "maybe" meant yes. Bush's ambivalent refusal to a half-serious offer of resignation was in fact a request for the real thing. "He didn't clear it up," Sununu later explained to friends. "He didn't clear it up." In fact, he did, but in his own way. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times led their front pages the next day with stories about Sununu's pending departure--unmistakable leaks from the President's allies. Sununu immediately went to see Bush and told him that they had both suffered enough. "I don't want my family to go through another day of this," he said. Within days the former Governor had explained to friends that he was disappointed that Bush couldn't deliver the bad news himself but relied instead upon his son to do his dirty work. "What really bothers me," said a close Sununu ally from New Hampshire, "is that the President couldn't tell John to his face, that he sent his kid to do it. John deserved better than that, and I know it bothered John too." Weeks later, after Sununu was gone, many of the same officials who had received the secret letters from the President tried to impress upon reporters that George W.'s role had been vastly exaggerated. As one insisted, ``I know for a fact that he hadn't been sent there by anyone." This was revisionism. Bush was just covering his tracks after the kill, perhaps embarrassed that he lacked the guts to fire his chief of staff himself. BUSH THE BIT PLAYER In his first 22 months in office George Bush made the evening news a third as often as his predecessor. The tactic was intentional: Bush believed that too much time on television would only raise public expectations about what he could accomplish. "It's not honest," press secretary Marlin Fitzwater said. "The President of the U.S. cannot solve every problem from warts to AIDS." David Demarest, Bush's communications director, put it this way: "This President does not see himself at the center of national attention." Bush had reason to worry that if he became too commonplace in America's living rooms, the public would tire of him prematurely. Pollster Robert Teeter had data that suggested the public actually resents a President who is on the news every night. Teeter regularly surveyed Americans for their sentiments about Bush and discovered that, as he once put it, "they don't like having to come home every night and turn on the television to learn what he did today." A President, as Bush put it, could get "overexposed." By keeping his head down, Bush was subtly telling Americans not to look to Washington, and particularly the White House, for answers. Bush instead sought to dial back his exposure, trimming the role of the presidency in the lives of most Americans. In this way, he was making a virtue of necessity: his inability to affect a swaggering leadership style dovetailed with his minimalist agenda. Plainspoken by nature, Bush was uncomfortable with dramatic language and hyperbole. He often deleted the most memorable passages from his speeches as he delivered them. He skipped over emotional lines about patriotism and national service, both before the Gulf War and after. (Radio reporters, who relied more than most reporters on strong words from a President for good stories, routinely let loose howls of frustration when Bush omitted the best lines from prepared texts.) The President didn't really believe that ideas could change people's minds. That, he figured, required careful, one-on-one negotiation--the kind of personal hard pitch that works best after a personal acknowledgment in a presidential speech. When their White House mess privileges were revoked early in 1989, Bush's speechwriters realized their work would be less important to the 41st President than it had been to his predecessor. His writers complained privately that the only portions of speech draft that the boss seemed to care about were the "acknowledgments"--the several paragraphs of names and perfunctory thank-yous that led nearly every Bush speech, in which he recognized by name the friends, political allies and routine famous people in every audience. If Bush saw someone he knew who was not mentioned in the text--and he nearly always did--he would break away in the middle of his comments to recognize the luminary, and often sent a stiff note to the errant researcher afterward. It was, several speechwriters explained, the only thing Bush ever complained about. Several White House officials tried to take advantage of Bush's interest in public opinion polls to present him opportunities for rhetorical leadership. They sent the President surveys that asked respondents not only what they thought, but how much they knew and didn't know, and whether new information and arguments might change their opinions. For example, a July-August 1990 poll by Teeter's old firm, Market Opinion Research, asked 1,000 registered voters whether the government spends "too much, not enough, or just the right amount on federal farm subsidies." Most of the respondents, thinking of aid to small farmers in need of drought assistance and such, answered "not enough" (43%) or "the right amount" (12%). Then the respondents were told, "In 1988, 43% of federal farm subsidies went to farm operators whose average net income was $96,000 per year." With this new information, 55% of those polled said that "the federal program should be changed [and] we should only help small farms." This offered an opening for Bush to shift public opinion and policy against the farm subsidies for the wealthy that he said he opposed. But he failed to follow through in any bold way. Nor did he think he needed to. Midway through his term, Bush concluded that his Administration had already done enough to win re-election. "Let me suggest the following," Sununu said in November 1990 to the annual meeting of the Conservative Leadership Conference. "There's not another single piece of legislation that needs to be passed in the next two years for this President. In fact, if Congress wants to come together, adjourn and leave, it's all right with us. We don't need them." BUSH THE GENERAL Saddam Hussein was a hard man and reckoned he knew a patsy when he saw one. The Iraqi leader had watched with contempt as Bush tried for years, as Vice President and President, to appease him with trade concessions, intelligence sharing and an obsequious, boys-will-be-boys attitude toward Saddam's use of chemical weapons and torture against his own people and his threats against Israel and Kuwait. Saddam also saw how Bush had tried to appease the rulers of China after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, and Mikhail Gorbachev after his March 1990 crackdown on Lithuania. But after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Saddam learned better about Bush, and so did Bush's countrymen. In the opening words of his somber televised address on Aug. 8, 1990, announcing the initial dispatch of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia, Bush could have been describing himself as easily as America: "In the life of a nation, we are called upon to define who we are and what we believe." In the gulf crisis, George Bush found something to believe in. He saw almost immediately that Iraq's invasion of Kuwait threatened vital U.S. interests and must be reversed--probably by force. And perhaps for the first time in his long political career, he never wavered. He defied the consensus of his aides on several crucial questions, including the decision to intervene in the first week of August and the move in early January to seek explicit backing from Congress before starting the air war. He encountered public resistance at half a dozen turns in the crisis and overcame it, not with soaring rhetoric, but with bold actions, each of which shifted public opinion toward support of his policy. Crucial to Bush's success in winning support at home and abroad was his well-practiced and ruthless use of deception. He repeatedly misled Saudi Arabia, the other coalition allies, the American public and Congress by exaggerating the nature of the threat that Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia and by concealing a number of intentions: the massive size and duration of the military deployment he had in mind, his immediate determination not only to defend Saudi Arabia but also to liberate Kuwait and his private assessment from the early weeks of the crisis that all-out war was likely. Through it all Bush radiated an eerie calm and sense of command. Gone was the shrill, arm-waving creature who reversed himself on taxes, civil rights and abortion. The qualities Bush displayed throughout the gulf crisis--stubborn resolve and adherence to principle, resourcefulness and foresight--were particularly striking in contrast with his feckless performance at home. In his speeches Bush evoked a "new world order" in which the U.S., as the sole superpower, would cooperate with the humbled Soviet Union and work through the U.N. to resolve conflicts. This new order represented an appealing hope and vision, but Bush focused his war aims squarely on the restoration of the old order, which he and his aides strictly defined as the status quo ante bellum--the situation that existed before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. In the gulf crisis Bush performed with uncommon conviction and ingenuity, but he served as he did at home: as a warrior for the status quo. The U.S. strategy toward Iraq was worked out far in advance during a relaxed, four-hour session between Bush and Brent Scowcroft, as they trolled for bluefish off Kennebunkport. The two men assumed the U.S. would do whatever was necessary to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, but was that enough? What further objectives should they pursue? The overthrow of Saddam? Destruction of Iraq's chemical-, biological- and nuclear-weapons programs and its ballistic missiles? As a lesson in the dangers of expanding one's war aims, Scowcroft recalled the U.S. experience four decades earlier in defending South Korea from invasion by the communist North. Rather than merely expel the invaders, the U.S. tried to unify Korea by marching all the way to the border with China. In response, China intervened. The conflict lasted nearly three more years, cost tens of thousands of additional casualties and poisoned U.S.-Chinese relations for 20 years. All to end up back at the status quo ante bellum. If it came to war, Scowcroft argued, the U.S. would have ample opportunity to bomb deep inside Iraq, to destroy its unconventional and ballistic weapons and to cripple its conventional army as an offensive threat. But those objectives must remain unstated. Nor must the overthrow of Saddam be a public objective. When he retreated from Kuwait, or was driven out, Bush and Scowcroft were assuming, his generals and Baath Party leaders would tear Saddam apart like carrion and elevate a new leader who would be eager to restore ties with the rest of the world. As it turned out, the ground war lasted only one hundred hours. But even weeks after victory over Iraq, Bush was nagged by the problems of the Kurds. Baker had just returned from a visit to the Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq and phoned Bush to describe the horrors he had seen. What was more, the camera crews with him had seen them too; night after night, the networks were leading the news with pitiful Kurdish children dead and dying. Then Bush received a phone call from President Turgut Ozal of Turkey. The plight of the Kurds, Ozal insisted, was "an embarrassment to you and a political threat to us, and it will get worse, believe me." Then Ozal said firmly, Here is what you must do. First, you must get the Kurds down out of the mountains to the flatlands where they can be helped. Second, to get them out of the mountains, you must protect them from the Iraqi military. This went against Bush's oft-stated instinct to avoid entanglement in Iraq's ferocious tribal conflicts. Yet as Bush canvassed the European allies, he learned, as Baker had warned, that they were prepared to move without the U.S., leaving him to look cold and heartless and, more important, like a man surrendering the leadership of the new world order. By Tuesday evening, Bush had turned his policy 180 degrees. He would send ground troops into northern Iraq to protect the Kurds. "So much for our nice, clean victory," carped one White House opponent of the new policy, "and for not getting bogged down in Middle East politics." The Kurds would be only the first bit of unfinished business in Iraq to gradually corrode what should have been an untarnished triumph for Bush's leadership in diplomacy and war. Yet those who chided Bush for not "finishing the job" by ousting Saddam seldom thought through the costs and difficulties of such a mission. "Saddam was not going to sit and wait on his veranda for us," said Bob Gates, then Scowcroft's deputy. "We saw how difficult it was to find Manuel Noriega in a much smaller country with a smaller army." Saddam's ouster would have required a full-blown takeover of Iraq, incurring additional U.S. casualties. It would have committed the U.S. to putting a new government in place and would certainly have splintered the wartime coalition, leaving the U.S. to do it alone. "Can you imagine how we would be pounded," Gates said, "if we were `bogged down' in an `inconclusive civil war' in Iraq?" But even victory began to work against Bush. Pollsters reported that although Americans were mightily impressed with Bush's performance during the gulf crisis, they resented the fact that he did not apply the same skills to reversing America's economic decline. "If he ever exerted the same kind of leadership on domestic issues that he did in the Persian Gulf," said Representative Leon Panetta, the California Democrat who chairs the House Budget Committee, "there's no question President Bush could have a significant impact." BUSH THE CAUTIOUS COACH When Bush says he considers himself a conservative, he sees his role as a conservator: one entrusted with an inheritance and concerned less with expanding it than with guarding it. His is an old-fashioned "order" conservatism, which seeks to impose no new vision of society but rather to defend the status quo and to avoid mistakes of commission--in sharp contrast with the risk-taking, china-breaking conservatism of Reagan and Barry Goldwater. Bush often volunteers, in contrast with the rhetoric of Reagan, that he does not "hate government." Bush is, however, deeply skeptical and pessimistic toward attempts by government to force the pace of human progress. He believes that prog ress comes, when it comes, through glacial changes in attitudes. When Bush ran for the U.S. Senate from Texas in 1964, for example, he made opposition to civil rights legislation the centerpiece of his campaign. "I believe that the solution to this grave problem," he stated in a campaign brochure, "lies in the hearts and goodwill of all people." The first duty of a President, Bush believed, was "prudence," a quality he esteemed above all others. Bush further defined this duty in terms of the teachings of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek known as the father of medicine, who counseled young physicians, In trying to heal, first take care to do no harm. Though masked by the President's sunny disposition and boundless energy, the phrase "Do no harm" became a pessimistic leitmotiv for the Bush Administration. Where John Kennedy won the presidency in 1960 on the slogan "We can do better," Bush's byword, uttered often by him and to him in private strategy sessions, was "We could do worse." "I don't want to make any early-term mistakes like Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs," Bush told his advisers. Bush could always see the pitfalls he wished to avoid more clearly than any affirmative goals he might have in mind. Defending his restrained response to the Soviet crackdown on Lithuania in early 1990, Bush quoted one of his favorite philosophers, Yogi Berra, saying, "I don't want to make the wrong mistake." When he was pressed in late 1991 to fight the double-dip recession with a middle-class tax cut and extended unemployment benefits, Bush demurred, endorsing the laissez-faire view that recessions can be beneficial in helping businesses to become "leaner" and "more competitive." He added that "my goal is to see that government doesn't get in the way." Bush also argued that recessions are largely self-correcting, saying, "That is an argument for not doing anything dumb...that's going to make it worse." Bush often tries to portray his dearth of principles and his irresolution as virtues. Asked by an Iowa student why he reversed his stand on abortion rights and embraced Reagan's staunch pro-life stance, Bush replied, "Have you ever changed your mind? That's one thing about intellectual honesty." At other points, however, Bush has defended his abortion switch by pointing out that the number of abortions had grown enormously and convinced him that the practice should be curtailed by law. This line of argument is common with Bush, and telling. Few particular practices, whether abortion or S&L shysters forking out billions in taxpayer-insured deposits to their cronies in commercial real estate, are abhorrent to Bush inherently, but only when taken to excess. Thus, after reading Den of Thieves, the James Stewart tale of Wall Street market rigging and self-dealing, Bush pronounced himself disturbed by the "greed" involved but drew no larger conclusions about deregulation of taxpayer-insured financial industries. Thus, the moral question at the heart of the abortion debate--the rights of a fetus versus those of its mother--are of less interest to Bush than the number of fetuses involved. Pollster Teeter, like Bush, often quotes former Republican National Committee chairman Ray Bliss, who advised that in politics one should always wait a few days before taking an important position or making a major decision, because "by then, you might not have to decide at all." With the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and with Bush disinclined to wage partisan jihad, compromise seemed the President's only hope of accomplishment. Still, even Teeter warned Bush to guard against the impression that he was some sort of national real estate broker whose only goal was to close a deal, any deal. Teeter and other close advisers urged Bush to "tell people what you would do if you were a dictator, if you didn't have to deal with Congress." Bush seldom followed that advice. Whenever he was asked why he wasn't leading on some controversial issue--say, the need to reduce the burden of regressive Social Security taxes on middle-income wage earners--Bush would spread his arms, shrug and reply, "Why don't Republicans and Democrats [in Congress] rise up and do something about it?" Bush expected the Democrats in Congress to take the lead in domestic policy and told them so repeatedly in private sessions. While Reagan had staffers dig out Harry Truman's old placard THE BUCK STOPS HERE and place it on his desk, Bush as President sent the thing back into storage. Bush left no doubt of his defensive, risk-averse temperament in a 1989 interview about his baseball career at Yale, where he served as team captain and first baseman, despite having one of the worst batting averages on the squad. Asked what kind of manager he would be, Bush replied, "Probably fairly cautious. I'd play by the averages, probably get people on, be cautious about too much stealing and bunt 'em over...I think just steady is what I'd say." Bush lacks a clear rationale for a second term in part because the imperative that drove his first four years--re-election--will be moot on Nov. 4, 1992. Absent the political goal of winning a second term, Bush would have no star to chart by. Already, the Bush White House is in danger of intellectual exhaustion after not four but 12 years in office. Many of the brightest Bush aides have no plans to stay around for a second term because they know the fun that goes with the heavy lifting of legislation is over. "You've got to get out of here soon," said one top official as he pondered his options in the spring of 1992, "because nothing is going to happen here in a second term." A second Bush term would look a lot like the first: more of the same, only less. Bush would rely on his instincts, reacting to events as necessary. His goals wouldn't be bold, but then his actions wouldn't be imprudent. Like the experienced captain of a cruise ship, Bush would take care to coddle the first-class passengers, and though he would be indifferent to the vessel's course and destination, he could at least be trusted not to sink it. </body></article> </text>