Why Bush is losing

ELSEWHERE in this issue, William Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, and Hadley Arkes tell George Bush what he must do to win. For the time being, however, he continues to lag behind Governor Clinton. The liberal explanation is that Mr. Bush got no Convention bounce because of the extremism of the family-values campaign. Would-be historians--Sidney Blumenthal, Garry Wills--argue that the President's push on family values followed a lifelong pattern of truckling to the Right.

The grit of truth at the center of this pearl of philosophy is that President Bush does have a history of making large gestures to hold conservatives in line. The reason they need holding, however, is that Mr. Bush in office consistently fails to understand their analyses or act on their concerns. He truckles to the Right every fourth year because he has been truckling to everyone else in the other three.

He began to lose the support of conservatives and the country when he broke his tax pledge in order to consummate the 1990 budget deal. (The pledge itself had been necessary because he lacked the anti-tax reputation of Ronald Reagan.) Besides damaging his integrity, the reversal lost him the loyalty of voters who understood that tax cuts had fueled the Reagan boom and were unwilling to have the budget balanced on their wallets. A year later, Mr. Bush signed a civil-rights bill which he had denounced, correctly, as a quota bill, thus losing voters concerned with racial fairness in the workplace.

Each step was intended to show flexibility and to win over moderate independent, and even Democratic, voters. Each step instead peeled off a part of the winning Reagan-Bush coalition. Having driven economic and social conservatives away, the President was left with moral conservatives, who stood by him because of his firmness on abortion. They set the tone at Houston because they were the only people left in the Big Tent.

If Mr. Bush is now beset by the dangers of a narrowly focused campaign, it is because he has been narrowing his own base of support for half his term. No kingdom is ever lost for want of a single nail.