Campaign 2000: Slow and Steady - But will it win W. the race? - George W. Bush

Philadelphia

The book on George W. Bush is that he ran as a centrist until he lost in New Hampshire, dashed to the right to beat John McCain in South Carolina, then retreated back to the center once he cinched the GOP nomination. Which is funny, because to the untrained eye-and even to the trained one-Bush on the stump appears almost exactly the same as he did six months ago.

At a fundraiser here with about 100 sharply dressed GOP donors, W. stands beside veep contender Tom Ridge, wispy in comparison to the stocky Pennsylvania governor, who looks as if he could have been forged from a perfectly square piece of granite. Bush shrugs and nods, smiling, as he takes the podium in his aw-shucks way and launches into his well-worn stump speech.

W. repeats his usual riff about his wonderful wife: "You can tell the nature of a man by the company he keeps." He recycles his usual lines about wanting "the American dream to touch every willing heart," giving some of the $4 trillion surplus "to the people who pay the bills," vowing as president "to keep the peace," and on and on, up to and including his final pledge to "uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which you have elected me, so help me God."

To be sure, the symbolism of the Bush campaign has shifted-from Bob Jones University to the barrios-and the slogans have mutated from "Compas sionate Conservative," to "Reformer with Results," to something in between. (For his reform speech in Philadelphia, Bush's podium is emblazoned with the phrase, "A New Approach," which is lame and-in a departure for the Bushies-not even alliterative.) But it is hard to track Bush's movements on a simple right-to-center grid because he is trying, with some success, to forge a post-Gingrich, post-Clinton politics that defies such lazy categorization.

At the same time Bush has supposedly moved to the center, he has staked his campaign on a partial privatization of Social Security, an old right-wing chestnut. Why isn't this a move to the right? He wants to trash the ABM Treaty-a position dear to Jesse Helms's heart-but also to destroy U.S. missiles unilaterally. Is this shifting right or left? He talks all the time about bipartisanship-sounding like GOP moderates-but uses this rhetoric to bludgeon Clinton and Gore. Again, right or left?

Since the primaries, the Bush campaign has been playing a version of the Dick Morris gambit that worked so well for Clinton: offering small- scale proposals that aren't so important as policy but that make symbolic statements about a candidate's character. Clinton's 1996 school-uniform/V-chip blitz was meant both to show that his party, purged of McGovernite excesses, shared the values of the middle class, and to inoculate him against personal scandal. The Democrats, then, could be trusted to expand government again.

Similarly, Bush's barrage of housing credits and literacy programs and community health centers is designed to show that he understands the worries of the middle class, and is free of Newt Gingrich's alleged flights of antigovernment fancy. Bush is no extremist; he can be trusted. So maybe it's safe to let Republicans limit-or at least reshape-government again.

Character is the campaign's subterranean issue, and Bush is leveraging it to build a rationale for his election-even during a time of peace and prosperity-in a way that his father in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996 never did. At the moment, one reason Gore isn't getting traction on issues is that people don't like him or trust him. Meanwhile, Bush's biggest policy proposals have become ways of reinforcing the idea that he possesses that most important of all political character traits: leadership. (Polls consistently show that voters think Bush is a better leader than Gore.)

In this, Bush is stealing a page from John McCain. McCain's advocacy of campaign-finance reform was important mainly because it marked him as a leader willing to buck his party. Gore made the mistake of trying to duplicate McCain's success by aping his positions, thus appearing opportunistic. Bush, in contrast, has found his own version of campaign finance in Social Security reform and tax cuts, positions that are notionally risky or unpopular. So far, Gore's attacks have served mostly to demonstrate how gutsy Bush is to have taken these positions in the first place.

Which is the clincher. Bush's complaint that Washington is locked in a "war-room mentality" sets up a dynamic in which Gore underscores W.'s criticisms with every partisan attack. The thrust of Bush's campaign is that the country may be fine, but Washington is broken-because of the Clinton scandals, because it's out of touch, because the two parties are trapped in an old politics that keeps them from adopting creative solutions to problems such as entitlements and arms control.

So, what Bush offers is bipartisan comity, more individual choice (through Social Security accounts, school vouchers, tax cuts, etc.), and new thinking for old problems. This sometimes sounds like "beyond left and right" mush, but at bottom it is an anti-Clinton message, and may well represent the most effective way of selling conservative politics since Gingrich caught the populist wave of 1994.