Pyrrhus on the hustings

National Review, March 16, 1992

OF ALL, the possible interpretations of New Hampshire's results, the least plausible has been George Bush's. Mr. Bush seems to believe that this was a matter of style not substance. When the returns were in he issued a terse statement that did not mention Buchanan by name, much less give him credit for a good effort. A day later he appeared on television to tell America that the Bush campaign was taking off the gloves as a new set of ads attacking his opponent was prepared. The idea is that Pat Buchanan can be beaten with a combination of Peggy Noonan and Willie Horton.

This is an all too familiar pattern by now: conservatives get fiery speeches and comforting words; liberals get the legislation. On the day the President delivered his State of the Union address, for example, Education Secretary Lamar Alexander had already surrendered to Teddy Kennedy on vouchers for private schools. This same dissonance marks the response to 11 weeks of active campaigning by Mr. Buchanan. All along the President has been trying to look pained while telling people that he "understands the message of dissatisfaction." But he refuses to make policy changes in line with his words. Blaming Congress for not considering his growth packages will not do the trick. Americans know Congress is to blame. But they want to know what the President plans to do about it.

After fudging for a year whether we were in a recession, the President told everyone to wait for the State of the Union. When the State of the Union came he told us to wait for March 20. With this deadline just three weeks away, Hill Republicans tell us that there is no strategy for enforcing that deadline. Yet Mr. Bush could, for example, announce that he was unilaterally indexing capital gains to inflation, or exercising a line-item veto on Democratic spending. His present strategy of Waiting for Godot will not play in Peoria, any more than it played in South Dakota, where he got only two-thirds of the vote running against nobody. After a while even the biggest dullard in the audience has to figure out the point of the play is that Godot never arrives.

Nowhere in this confusion better reflected than in the ousting of the head of the National Endowment of the Arts, John Frohnmayer. Mr. Frohnmayer's departure came after critics publicized a $5,000 grant to the magazine Queer City, which had published a poem celebrating the rape of a white woman in Central Park by a black gang. Not only did Mr. Frohmayer defend the poem, but in an emotional farewell to his staff he cited his fight against even the mildest of congressional anti-pornography restrictions as his greatest achievement and expressed the wish that "this eclipse of the sould will soon pass and with it the lunacy that sees artists as enemies and ideas as demons."

The danger to the Bush campaign in playing up Frohnmayer's removal is that it invites questions as to why he was appointed in the first place and then allowed to hang on so long. Indeed why he won't be leaving until May 1. Moreover, in his letter to Mr. Frohnmayer, the President noted that "some of the art funded by the NEA does not have may enthusiastic approval." Does it have his reluctant approval?

Richard Darman's continued tenure at the Office of Management and Budget is an even greater threat to Mr. Bush's Presidency. It was Mr. Darman who removed even modest child tax relief from the Administration's list of priorities. His presence prevents Mr. Bush from conceding that the 1990 budget summit was a colossal blunder. And Mr. Bush's reluctance to admit a mistake on this central issue--which he himself made the cornerstone of his last campaign--undermines his credibility on every other issue. He makes matters almost unimaginably worse by maintaining, as he did in New Hampshire, that he never took the pledge not to raise taxes the first time around.

Mr. Buchanan all along has said that his purpose in running was to deliver a message. Within a week of New Hampshire the Administration's response had changed from lofty dismissal to accusations that the Buchanan campaign could deliver the White House to Democrat. Mr. Bush's one concession--the Fronhmayer sacking--is essentially cosmetic. Mr. Bush is still privately convinced that he can win in November without giving unmistakable evidence that he has returned to conservative actions as well as conservative rhetoric. He is like the proverbial liberal judge who assured the court that his judgment would not be influenced by one mugging. "Mug him again!" we reply, with the little old lady in tennis shoes. Georgia and Super Tuesday, with Buchanan on the ballot, will provide good occasions for a little felony.