Bush's impractical pragmatism - includes related article on the administration and the homosexual lobby

National Review, Oct 1, 1990 by William McGurn

WASHINGTON, D.C.-On an easy Friday afternoon in late July a rough of senior Administration aides was sitting in the White House Mess having lunch when the word filtered through: Justice William J. Brennan was resigning from the Supreme Court. The reaction at the table was virtually uniform. "Oh, s---," said one.

In a few hours these same men would go into high gear, so that by Monday morning George Bush could announce that his choice to replace Brennan was David Souter, whose approval seems all but certain and who will probably turn out to be the strict constructionist the President says he is, with the potential to shift the High Court decisively to the right. But the episode in the Mess was revealing. Instinct told these people that this event was, a predicament, not an opportunity.

Small in itself, the incident nonetheless illustrates the tremendous disparity between the Bush approach and that of his predecessor. Whereas the Reagan people arrived in Washington with a specific agenda of what they wanted to change, the Bush people see themselves as professionals, managers unencumbered by ideology. Consequently, President Bush does not hit the rhetorical high notes that Reagan did (his "Read my lips" speech being the notable exception), which in turn means conservatives are reluctant to give him credit even when he does the right thing.

Not that all the differences between Reagan and Bush are to the Gipper's advantage. With a 70 per cent approval rating and 12 sustained vetoes, Bush enjoys broader support than Reagan ever did, and this extends to communities, such as blacks, where Reagan never could. This difference in approach also means that conservatives and Bushites often argue past each other: while the former see an Administration heading for the rocks -at least before Saddam Hussein's Kuwaiti Anschluss-the White House can point to record popularity, every veto upheld in Congress, and, now, a superb handling of the gravest foreign-policy challenge Bush has faced. The question is what this approval means, whether it can last, and what Bush will do with it.

"Reagan was successful because he was not a member of the governing establishment when he came into office, and he was not a member when he left office," says Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, whose just-released tax package was designed in part to get the President back on track. "George Bush is a member of that governing establishment, and his success will be to change that system. The next sixty days will be crucial in determining whether Bush will govern with the American people and coercing the Left or with the Left coercing the people."

Even conservatives acknowledge that Bush is more alert, more accessible, and more informed than Reagan ever was. Much as they hate the word, they concede too that the Bush Administration technically is more competent. Because this technical efficiency is not tied to any specific goal save that of staying in office, however, Bush has gained himself any number of temporary allies but very few disciples. This in turn means that on issues such as abortion, where he has been much stronger and more principled than Reagan, not only does he get zero credit, he is denounced as an opportunist. Bipartisan Dangers

HIS COMMITMENT to the Bipartisan Presidency is an even more serious liability. Far from making things easier for him in Congress, Bush's outreach has only made him more subject to its whims. In a Wall Street Journal article this summer, Fred Barnes compared Bush's strategy to the Nixon approach of selective endorsement of the opposition's themes, arguing that the price of stealing some of the issues from the Democrats has been "a moderate-to-conservative President, but liberal government."

To be sure, Bush has curbed the Democrats' grosser excesses by using the veto to great effect, certainly to greater effect than Reagan, who huffed and puffed but usually signed in the end. Bush's 12 vetoes have been on issues ranging from visas for Chinese students, to Medicaid funding for abortion, to minimum-wage increases. But while Bush has won the pitched battles, the vetoes are a sign that Congress controls the war. American Conservative Union chairman David Keene says that the most apt comparison is with Gerald Ford, a nice man who ended up forced to resort to the veto a record number of times. "Because [congressional leaders] didn't know where he would draw the line they were constantly probing and prodding until they found they'd crossed it," says Keene.

There are other indications of the degree to which the agenda is set by Congress. In the past 18 months, there have been bills on minimum wage, child care, disabled rights, civil rights, clean air, etc.; capital gains, a Bush priority, is not even on the docket. Further, the White House's courting of Democrats-e.g., John Sununu's direct negotiations with Teddy Kennedy on civil-rights languager-ankles with Republican lawmakers on the Hill. It also spurs the Democrats to push for more than they ever would have dared with Reagan. "The Democrats are more militant when they negotiate these days," says one Senate staffer. "They know the President cannot be rigidly principled when he's said his goal is to be kinder and gentler."