HOW CLEVER is George W. Bush? Before his October 1 speech to the Christian Coalition in Washington, Bush and his advisers debated how far he should go in tailoring his remarks to the specific interests of religious conservatives. Some aides felt Bush should talk up his Christian beliefs and pro-life position on abortion. But chief strategist Karl Rove and consultant Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition executive director, urged Bush to give his standard stump speech to prevent the press from saying he pandered to a right-wing audience. Bush agreed with Rove and Reed, but still wanted his Christian, pro-life views aired. The solution: Give the task of stressing that side of Bush to church-state lawyer Jay Sekulow, who was introducing the candidate. Bush is not only “standing up for the life of the unborn child,” Sekulow said, his life “is a story of the hope and healing that comes from Jesus Christ.”
Pretty clever, huh? And it worked. The Christian Coalition crowd responded enthusiastically to Bush, and the press didn’t accuse him of pandering. Moreover, the underlying strategy of the Bush campaign for the Republican presidential nomination was vindicated, again. Bush wants to create a broad center-right coalition behind his candidacy. His goal, in Rove’s high-flown description, is “melding a conservative mind with a compassionate heart.” In practical terms, it means Bush is wary of embracing conservatives too closely, especially the Christian Right and congressional Republicans.
Getting away with this is not easy. Bush’s tack is to agree with conservatives while not appearing to be one of them. He’s at least nominally in favor of a constitutional amendment banning abortion, but he rarely mentions that. He endorsed the $ 792 billion GOP tax cut, opposes the comprehensive test-ban treaty, wants Social Security partially privatized, relishes serious tort reform, backs both school vouchers and charter schools, and is eager to increase defense spending dramatically and deploy the Strategic Defense Initiative. In other words, he backs the agenda of congressional Republicans. At the same time, he takes potshots at them.
The Bush team believes the image of conservatives has badly deteriorated since the GOP takeover of Congress. “We’re fighting an image of the Republican party forged in ’94,” says a Bushie. “It’s worth fighting.” Another Bush adviser notes that Republican governors, on average, have a favorable rating of 62 percent and that Bush consistently leads Vice President Al Gore by 15 to 20 points in polls. But congressional Republicans “have become defined as mean-spirited, nasty, and kind of foaming.” Thus, according to this adviser, Bush is justified in differentiating himself from them.
Few Republicans on Capitol Hill are indignant about this. For one thing, Bush’s occasional zingers are mild compared with the attacks on them by Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes, and Patrick Buchanan. And unlike Sen. John McCain, Bush hasn’t actually embraced any liberal proposals and isn’t a hero of liberal reporters and columnists. Also, many congressional Republicans regard him as the most attractive candidate at the top of the GOP ticket. Representative David McIntosh of Indiana, who recently endorsed Bush, believes his own race for governor is strengthened by running on a ticket led by Bush.
There is a downside, however, to Bush’s cleverness. His worst problem is that he appears to be copying a tactic made famous by President Clinton. It’s not helpful to a Republican presidential candidate to be accused of “triangulation” and called Clintonesque. But that’s what occurred after Bush zinged House Republicans for proposing to spread out Earned Income Tax Credit payments to avoid dipping into the Social Security surplus. Bush was merely seizing an opportunity to win some points for himself, but it produced a major embarrassment for Republicans and prompted Clinton to praise Bush. The president was particularly delighted by Bush’s charge that Republicans were “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” These are liberal buzz words, anathema to most Republicans.
If he’s not careful, Bush may jeopardize what allies call his “governing strategy.” The idea here, as Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri puts it, “is to help produce a Congress you’re generally in agreement with and which allows you to get things done.” Blunt, the House liaison to the Bush campaign, doesn’t think Bush has damaged this strategy. Bush barbs “will happen occasionally, but there will not be a pattern of it,” Blunt says. Maybe not, but Bush has alienated House GOP whip Tom DeLay, for now at least. Moments before a key appropriations vote, Democrat David Obey of Wisconsin, a sour and self-righteous liberal, jumped on Bush’s statement and insisted Republicans choose between Bush, the Texas governor, and DeLay, a Texas congressman. DeLay won that vote, but the Earned Income Tax Credit proposal soon died. Yes, DeLay will probably get over it. One of his colleagues says: “Bush may be trying to push himself away from us, but we’re not trying to push ourselves away from him.”
Another risk of Bush’s GOP-bashing is that it may drown out Bush’s message. This happened on October 5 when the candidate delivered an education speech in New York City. The speech included a serious plan to expand charter schools, but that drew minimal media attention. Instead, the press focused on three sentences, which had been drafted weeks before. All too often the GOP has, he said, claimed American culture is “slouching toward Gomorrah,” used the “sterile language of rates and numbers, of CBO this and GNP that,” and “confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself.”
These were clever lines, painful to some Republicans, but all the more distressing to Democrats. Their greatest fear is that Bush is successfully softening his conservatism and making it palatable to a broad spectrum of voters. To battle against this, on October 7, Democrats brought out their biggest gun: Clinton. He immediately fell into Bush’s trap, reminding reporters how conservative Bush is on guns, taxes, and Social Security. This is exactly what Bush wants others to say, sparing him the task.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
