George Bush, Politician
Fossedal, Gregory A.
Gregory A. Fossedal GEORGE BUSH, POLITICIAN An issue nerd argues why the Veeper cannot wait until Labor Day to make his move. G eorge Bush was giving a speech at Lander's Restaurant in Lebanon,...
...Knowing every one of Bush's advisers, moreover, doesn't tell you whether a President Bush would, say, support enterprise zones, or education vouchers, or a day-care proposal that doesn't shaft stay-at-home mothers, or a loose monetary policy, or a gold standard...
...So you have to read between thetea leaves: figure out who's advising him on what, and more than that, which advisers will be listened to on which issues and in what contexts...
...Bush said, according to one account...
...I'd like to put in something about this tax-hike commission," Bush said, citing the Gigot column...
...1-Dun's Business Month, 1984...
...Now, there's a flip side to all this...
...Upandupandup, like stacked dishes...
...Like Reagan, Bush can be a softie for a personal friend...
...On March 29, Bush said only that explicit "trade barriers" would not be the "key" to reducing the trade deficit...
...I will get you a responsive reply pre-Nov...
...A military officer who worked on Bush's drug crusade told me: "He did nothing to Bush likes to head up his advisory boards with people who may take quite contradictory positions on things...
...Here's a proposal many Reaganites feel strongly about, certainly one of three or four key ideas most would say they'd like to see implemented...
...Bush isn't a gut fighter," Paul Weyrich says...
...None of the Brady recommendations would of itself cause a panic on Wall Street, but they all point in an unfortunate direction...
...Pipes worked for the Dole campaign in 1988...
...None involved any policy daring, however...
...Buckley looks at the draft, a bit mortified...
...Yet even such Fed members as Manuel Johnson and Martha Seeger continue flirting with money supply targets and other unreliable signals...
...Everything is going well enough until the Vice President comes across a quotation, inserted by speechwriter Chris Buckley, from the Greek historian and philosopher Thucydides...
...For in fact, on some issues, Bush has been an activist, and not only in the narrow sense of energetically backing a stand already established as safe by Reagan...
...It's funny, because Teeter is a pollster," says one Bush staffer...
...But: Some alternatives, such as nuclear power, are dangerous...
...Part of it: The man clearly wanted to be President, yet not in the manner of a Connally or Dole, thinking himself some sort of Ubermensch...
...He repeated the idea a few minutes later to Noonan: Already in there, Noonan said...
...Former Kemp campaign chief Charlie Black calls his Bush counterpart, Lee Atwater, "a master of the attack...
...Today, my guess is that's where a lot of Reaganites stand...
...There will be, as in the Nixon-Kennedy election, a double standard, in which gaffes by the inexperienced governor are treated as a ho-hum affair, while mistakes by the Vice President will reveal that he isn't so polished after all...
...Ah, media . . . great, that's great...
...All this is critical to the Bush campaign, because his organization starts out with an approach that tends to eschew issues...
...In one key meeting on the question, a participant said, Bush kept repeating: "We," a reference to the United States, not the Administration, "ought to have said this a long time ago...
...Arthur Laffer puts it this way: "If one guy proposes a 30 percent tax cut, and the other proposes research into whether it's feasible to have a 30 percent tax cut, who would you vote for...
...It's worthnoting that several 1986 Senate candidates who tried to establish themselves as distinctive in terms of issues—Wisconsin's Robert Kasten as a leader on tax reform, Idaho's Steve Symms and Missouri's Kit Bond as advocates of SDI deployment—survived the Democratic Senate landslide...
...And to deflect Kemp's charge that Bush is a Dole in veep's clothing...
...A Bush insider tells the story of how practically every adviser on the campaign was pushing for such an assault—unnecessarily...
...White House spokesmen prepared the way for its release with several days of leaks saying the President wasn't interested in its suggestions, and the Dow-Jones was up nearly 50 points on the Friday and Monday following these stories...
...Yet Reagan blanketed the state for him...
...Indeed, Bush's language on the trade bill weakened considerably throughout the campaign...
...What Bush will do," frets a former Bush aide on domestic policy, "is spend major efforts fighting against a tax increaseconstantly losing ground and giving in on energy taxes or consumption taxes or something...
...He is ac"I have your letter," Bush scrawled back...
...What else does he say...
...I want to keep countries around the world that want to be free—arefire and want to be—to stay free...
...Nor was it exactly responsible, handing a list of individuals we wanted removed—presumably without a trial—to the leaders of another country...
...I have your letter," Bush scrawled back...
...Some Reaganites heave no love sighs for the INF treaty, of course, but the mere fact that someone at the Bush campaign sees his victory in such terms is important...
...Mr...
...farmers, who understand inflation and deflation quite well...
...he shouted at the camera...
...On the other hand, many economists counted on Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve under Richard Nixon, to block any inflation tight-fistedly and keep the dollar linked to gold...
...Add to this the fact that the idea is popular with rich people—the kinds of people who contributed to the Bush campaign—and you've got yourself a Bush for President policy initiative...
...effort at victory, by contrast, might have proved much more popular...
...We're going to look into that," Bush promised...
...But Bush did pepper me with several unusually personal notes afterwards, hand-written Bush-o-grams on postcard style stationery with a dark blue, Yalish border around it...
...Sellers—an issue nerd and former GOP congressional candidate in Alabama, who now works for Daniel Graham's pro-Star Wars High Frontier outfit—has an idea for the Bush campaign...
...Yet voters, asked to support Ford-Dole on the basis of their sheer professionalism, had nothing to fall back on when it turned out they couldn't toss darts and chew gum at the same time...
...A more hopeful indicator was theBush assault on the National Economic Commission...
...What are the themes of the campaign...
...When Kemp and Bush met privately a few days after the former's withdrawal from the presidential race, Kemp reportedly asked what Bush plans to say about Star Wars in the fall...
...Not all Bush aides would agree with Pinkerton...
...That is, people resisted dying in a losing cause...
...Another excerpt: "Loved that poll...
...There's a hell of a difference...
...Nobody ever told Baker to stop meeting with all those senators and industry reps," a top Treasury aide says...
...and three, the INF treaty...
...It was hardly brave in terms of domestic U.S...
...industries, and hailed the decline of the dollar, which Bush told a group in Wisconsin has been "too strong, too long...
...territorial concessions allegedly made at Yalta and Helsinki, if they ever were made, effectively void...
...You need an enemy in politics, and ideological friends...
...It seems very solid...
...Sometimes you talk for an hour and at the end you don't know what he thinks...
...Bush was Vice President Teflon...
...Financial reporters and political commentators uniformly put at least some blame for the crash on the progress of Gephardtnomics...
...What I don't understand is how this is going to get us votes," Atwater says...
...Another Bush weak spot could be a tendency to make deals with the growing movement to re-regulate the economy, starting with the banking and stock and commodities markets, but only starting...
...It's notable that every single major policy pushed by Jim Baker—the 1981 and 1986 tax bills, the Third World debt bailout plan, the trade bill—involved a large measure of corporate welfarism: hardball lobbying, lots of meetings with the wheeler dealers, favors to hand out, favors to be withdrawn...
...Which is why a more relevant worry points directly against the standard that Bush has no fangs...
...Instead, Bush helped give away what his aide Bob Teeter has called "a great issue...
...If all this strikes readers as a bit insiderish, here are on-the-record assessments from two men who know Bush's mind on Star Wars as well as anyone outside of the Vice President's pia mater...
...And he didn't need to be spoonfed...
...He not only stuck with his free-trade stance in South Carolina, but did so against the strong urgings of Atwater and local politicians endorsing him in the state...
...Within a few weeks, FBI agents were in San Salvador to offer technical and operational assistance to the Salvadoran police and military...
...In any long conversation about Bush, whether with friend or foe of the Vice President, words like "jugular" and "attack" come up...
...There was nothing speculative about it...
...Bush's people will mine furiously for a few telling Dukakis quotations, on both domestic and foreign policy, and there are some embarrassing ones...
...But it's equally fair for critics to point out that Bush's outside story often seems to have whole pages and chapters omitted...
...Let's work something in on the commission," Teeter told an agreeable Atwater...
...And this is why I want to be President...
...By late March, however, the White House had winnowed the list of trade-bill provisions it found objectionable down to a handful, most having little to do with trade...
...Well arms control and education, like we've been saying...
...Bush, however, evidently had the same thought, though the story has never fully come to light...
...Ford's running mate also made a famous remark about "Democrat wars...
...But this time, the Vice President introduces the quotation without a pronunciation glitch...
...As one Bush aide, who asked not to be identified, put it: "Look, it's obvious that with Reagan, it's easier for somebody to walk in and pitch an idea to him, and at the end of the meeting, the old man smiles and says, 'Golly, let's do that.' But then the meeting breaks up and somebody says to Reagan, 'Mr...
...The conversation was in early 1988...
...Reminds me of Peter Lorre in Casablanca...
...Economists who briefed Bush on the idea—Richard Rahn, William Niskanen, and Arthur Laffer—say the VP heard little dissent...
...An aide who accompanied him on the trip says that the Vice President insisted he be briefedon U.S...
...Yea...
...At about the same time, Laffer and several other issue advisers were busily leaving messages for Bush—all urging him to read a Friday column on the same subject by Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal...
...Hoping, but still waiting...
...One would think Bush, who headed Reagan's panel on deregulation, would be vaccinated against this virus...
...Dole tried to film one, but garbled the line, Freudianly telling a head-scratching GOP audience: "I pledge to veto any bill that . . . cuts taxes...
...It's the press," Bush called to some aide,pointing at us, and making us feel as if we were in the middle of a Doonesbury cartoon...
...he was able to...
...A recent poll by the Los Angeles Times, not published when Sellers talked to Atwater, suggests that about half of all voters leaning to the Democrats might vote Republican on the issue of Star Wars...
...He has been, and not by coincidence, the vaguest Democrat on policy issues since Jimmy Carter in 1976...
...Indeed, one must surmise that in a Bush Administration, a lot of policies would be enacted not because anyone thinks they are good policies or even good politics, but simply because committees and bills and negotiations are set in motion and no one ever thinks to ask if maybe the train shouldn't be on an entirely different track...
...Still, it was Bush who offered to break the new ground himself—during a sensitive trip meant to rally support for the Euromissile deployments...
...Both of us felt more than a little uncorn-for-table...
...politics: elite opinion clamored for such a move...
...Now, with Bush, it's a lot harder to get that nod...
...Now, the State Department and National Security Council had already fully agreed to the new policy...
...Bush had advance approval from the White House to make a splash with the sensitive information...
...National Review editor and one-time Bush speechwriter Richard Brookhiser blamed Bush's 1980 loss partly on an inability to hit Reagan "personally . . . or ideologically...
...Zelda Novak contributed research to this article...
...But will he...
...Why give it...
...So to say that Bush's role as veep carries with it an enforced passivity just isn't fair...
...W ith tax rates down, monetary policy is going to be one key to the economy...
...In the last election between a Republican of experience and a rube governor-1976—the voice of experience set out to educate the Plains Hillbilly about the facts of Eastern Europe...
...So it's fine to reply, as Bush aide Jim Pinkerton told me, that "George Bush is running on his public record and his public statements, the 'outside story' as Rick Brookhiser has called it...
...With the budget deficit, there have been fewer carrots to pass around in the form of direct federal expenditures...
...Yet in several years of numerous meetings, Dornan concedes, "He's never said to me flatlywhat he would do...
...Dukakis is...
...In February, he blasted "mandatory retaliation and protectionism," a phrase that could certainly be applied to, for example, the so-called Super 301 provision of the trade bill...
...That's not an inconsiderable advantage...
...referring to a survey by my newspaper that showed Bush the favorite candidate among Dartmouth students...
...Bush said, seemingly oblivious to our own (somewhat rudely manifested) lack of enthusiasm...
...in fact, his reply didn't make any of my stories about the speech or his campaign generally...
...My friend with the camera was standing around with me, waiting to eat some of the free food left lying around and snarf a lukewarm bottle of Michelob, or whatever they were serving...
...But he's no Dick Wirthlin...
...On the other hand, Bush's attack on Dole and Robertson focused on their support for a separate textile bill, not the much broader mega-package being negotiated by Baker and the Administration...
...What issues can we look for down the road in the race...
...As Zschau recently told a group of Republican supporters: "In retrospect, we [Zschau and other GOP candidates] would have been a lot better off with fewer visits and more issues...
...For one thing, Bush likes to load up his advisory boards with people who may take quite contradictory positions on things: economists Arthur Laffer and Laffer-curve nemesis Martin Feldstein, for example...
...But then neither would a President Dukakis...
...Poland," Gerald Ford said, "is not under Communist domination...
...Likely reply by governor of Massachusetts: Too bad your Administration has opposed such spending for years...
...The influential James Baker wing of advisers, which includes prospective Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, can best be thought of not so much as moderate, or pragmatic, or non-rightist, but rather as shunning controversy...
...When Bush wants to stress something, he often gives a particular word or phrase a kind of herky-jerky, slow-motion em-pha-sis...
...rl" he really interesting events in 1 Bush's role as Vice President and former superbureaucrat lie elsewhere...
...Ms the philosopher Tudice—," Bush begins...
...Economists actually know less about monetary policy than most Third World mine workers or U.S...
...Add to this the fact that Jack Kemp—the man Bush aides expected to be Bush's main opponent—was for it, and you had a lot of interest...
...Ambassador, Governor Reagan has been very specific about some of the things he'd like to do to reduce the burden of government...
...Way back in the 1970s, Henry Kissinger observed that the Nixon Administration might have won more support for the Vietnam war by "moving to the right...
...We were working on the trade bill bright and early October 20...
...Baker has been a terrific man in government, working deals and even using the bureaucracy to come up with policy innovations such as the Administration's increasing emphasis on balanced monetary policy...
...The two most notable attackers in campaign '88 were Jack Kemp and Albert Gore...
...When Reaganites, trying to sway Buchanan into his own run for the White House in a 1987 meeting, turned to an assault on Bush, PJB demurred...
...This May, the businessman commented: "I'm still waiting...
...The Wall Street Journal editorialized on March 10, 1988: "As a political offensive, protectionism is dead...
...Bush came swooping down...
...And two of the efforts—drug control and the war on terrorism—haven't been very successful...
...a solid bank of research...
...That makes it harder to project a Bush presidency in terms of domestic policy...
...Bush: "Fine, good idea...
...For example, several times from 1982 to 1984, Bush flew into Florida to praise the work of his task force after major seizures of drugs...
...Then again, Bush sided with the agency estimates as valid even after Team B thoroughly exposed serious flaws...
...Noonan and Teeter smiled...
...Congressman: "But I mean, what things are you going to run on that will excite young people and conservative activists, get their passion aroused...
...The idea was embalmed after last October 19...
...Ford simply meant to say the U.S...
...One of my responses asked Bush if he was going to release more details about cutting the budget (readers who are beginning to think this was an obsession with me at that time are right...
...His means of communicating, though, seemed based not on telling you what he thinks is fundamental, but on saying "ab-solutely fundamental" a lot...
...The commission recommends, among other things, a super-agency to regulate many different markets at once...
...He doesn't understand that...
...The VP has already seen it," one caller was told...
...It's not just that Bush saw the obvious tax-and-manipulatethe-dollar bias in the commission itself: proposed by Mario Cuomo, legislated by Robert Dole, praised by George Will, and stacked with Paul Volcker and other austerians...
...Fast-forward to the Bush campaign plane, an hour or so later...
...Both attacks were plausible, in a sense...
...How can we snag you to help us out up here in this state...
...What's more, Dukakis has never voted on a single weapons system or foreign-aid bill in his life...
...And he can point out that "even the Reagan Administration" signed on to most of the elements of the trade bill as early as January...
...Here the news could be good, could be bad...
...The present one isn't...
...doesn't concede the legitimacy of Soviet rule...
...Nor did Bush take much convincing...
...Rule one is that even when Bush takes a new position, it's only when different parts of the bureaucracy are nearly united in favor...
...The result, as economist MelMonths after New Hampshire, Bush himself may still not realize that his victory there hinged not on a last-minute decision to attack Dole but on months of positive proposals...
...My job was to record any newsworthy remarks he might make for a local campus newspaper, and also, in the event of any major gaffes, charges, or tidbits, as a stringer for the New York Times...
...We need to rebuild the CIA, improve our intelligence capabilities...
...And a Bush appointment or two will be critical...
...One is that Dukakis, unlike the opponents Bush is familiar with, is often as hard to pin down as Bush himself...
...It's rather remarkable, if you consider that the two candidates who survived the primaries, Dukakis and Bush, were generally viewed as the least harsh and aggressive, the least like what some Reaganites want Bush now to be...
...fter the speech my hand went up...
...Few clauses went by without a qualifier, a contrast, or an "on the other hand, yes, you've gotta . . . " Sometimes the balancers piled precariously and piled more, high and higher...
...Bush, of course, would not raise personal income tax rates...
...His issue paper on the subject is more free trade than Bush's...
...A man seated in the audience asks, "What about this argument in the Wall Street Journal that you already have a line-item veto...
...but many of his positions remain unclear...
...That positive effort—and not the arrogant listing of untouchables—is a major reason why Bush is thought of highly by many Salvadoran leaders...
...Ask Bush anything about the Federal Reserve and he answers as he does on any issue he'd rather not talk about: with a name...
...The FBI effort helped bust several death squadders, right and left...
...Yet on these, too, the good news comes with some bad...
...presidential race...
...But the cut-taxes position is more likely to convince voters that the issue is vital...
...Over the weekend he spoke wth Bush at least twice—causing the VP to cancel at least one campaign appearance, according to an aide...
...Somehow, though, Bush was worming his way into my affections...
...At least some Bush aides have an inkling...
...Why haven't you done anything...
...We'll send you some of our position papers on that...
...Many politicians, for reasons mystical, mistakenly assume that voters equate negative campaigning with toughness...
...and somehow, new laws and regulations would emerge...
...He says he will work to improve the quality of education black children receive," Perkins continues, "and that he will target certain black school districts...
...Tax accusations stuck to Dole like fly-paper...
...Let's consider Joseph Perkins of the Wall Street Journal as he described one Bush-to-blacks reachout speech, taking it line by line: "The vice president promised to `restore and reinvigorate' the Commerce Department's Office of Minority Business Enterprise," Perkins writes...
...Truman called a special session of Congress after the 1948 convention to force the reluctant legislature to act on a number of bills...
...Here, though, comes the other exception to the rules about Bush...
...Bush will have to go much further to win black support...
...Bush seemed to move the same crowd a lot more than Howard Baker had before, or Robert Dole would later that fall...
...Amidst the pen-palisms'Greg, what a boost we got out here in Iowa"—my watchful eye never found the plan to cut federal spending by $90 billion (Reagan's 1976 gambit) that my heart desired...
...They respect his abilities, grudgingly...
...That's just what the Federal Bureau of Investigation was planning to do, but Bush's interest, according to one FBI agent, helped give the project a needed kick upstairs...
...It has promoted curbs on computer trading as well...
...Presidents always run against Congress, both as a means of securing their own election and in hopes of increasing their party's power in the House and Senate...
...President, we'd better not,' or Reagan just doesn't follow up on it...
...Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Pete du Pont, Pat Robertson—these are not, generally, men who deny or at least fuzz what they're for...
...Two promising strains to emerge from the Bush campaign, particularly after the veep's Super-Southern-Sweep: a proposal to make a concerted GOP appeal to blacks, and Bush's continued harping on the damage wreaked by the Imperial Congress on every issue from the budget deficit to foreign policy...
...Months after his political career came within a few hours of ending—Bush's final days in New Hampshire—the Vice President's campaign manager, and Bush himself, still may not realize that his victory hinged not on a last-minute decision to attack Dole, but on months of positive proposals which rendered Bush credible as a supply-side, tax-cutting Reaganite...
...In one office, Peggy Noonan drafted several sentences on the commission for a Bush speech...
...He knows it's going to be his decision," Dornan says...
...But they aren't quite comfortable with Bush personally or, more important, with the content and tone of what they fear will be the Bush campaign: the words "education" and "arms control," spliced with a few unimaginative assaults on "Congress," "Manuel Noriega," and the "Carter years...
...Even Reagan, who has also been known to blame economic events on irrational markets—throughout 1982, the President assured Americans that high interest rates were caused by uninformed bankers who didn't know inflation was licked—found the Brady report nonsense...
...It's Bush's legal staff, headed by C. Boyden Gray, that has done the serious thinking on the Congress issue...
...Bush's own role in resisting the 1988 advance of protectionism is at once more and less laudable than is known...
...It's a kind of situation," as Anderson says, "where the two kids are at the dance, and they want to meet each other, but they're not quite sure what to do...
...In another, hours later, Bush strategists met...
...Yet you can talk to a dozen people close to Bush and get a dozen different answers about what the Vice President would do...
...Indeed, when the New York Times asked Atwater his strategy for a victory last year, he pointed to Bush's Air Force II jet and the red-carpet being rolled out at one campaign stop and said, "That's why we're going to win...
...Snapshot . . . 'All right, I'll boil it down for you...
...Almost the first words Bush batted back were, "Alan Greenspan...
...Gotta run...
...Howard Baker...
...Well," Kemp asked, "do you favor rapid deployment...
...and, I think, a superior staff, a really superior group of people on the campaign who didn't panic...
...What a patronizing creep," my friend opined...
...Sure will...
...Even Marty Feldstein is in favor of that one," chortles Laffer...
...Dole was responding to a Mondale quip about "Republican recessions...
...What about it...
...He also says," Perkins writes, "he will work to support black families by insisting that absentee fathers fulfill their responsibility to their children...
...An old venture capitalist himself, Bush has always understood the importance of the measure...
...Take the Strategic Defense Initiative, simply as an example...
...Hey, young man, that was a good question you asked...
...But first you have to get a lot of experts out there...
...Teeley: "Oh yeah, that part...
...Bush, Buckley, and Bush press aide Peter Teeley are reviewing the text for the next stop...
...Bush made similar remarks in a meeting with Dole a few days later: "I'm against moving too fast...
...Nearly twenty years into his national political career, George Bush clearly stands for some things...
...Today, the officer says, "we have a hard time getting them to cooperate...
...Conservative Digest tossed the gold standard at him in 1986...
...Not impossible, though...
...As he said this, Bush started to wedge himself over toward my friend, the cameraman, gently pressing him back a little bit against a long table with empty beer cans...
...he's not trapped by his poll numbers...
...And the issue nerds are missing an opportunity to sway his campaign and create something they can get excited about if they don't reach out toward Bush...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 17 tually more articulate on foot than Ronald Reagan or Ted Kennedy—two heart-throb speakers who do poorly when not reading from index cards or a teleprompter...
...bills would be proposed...
...Yet, there is scant evidence that Gray's insights have animated the Bush campaign, and time runs short...
...In 1986, Reagan flew all over the country—where, at many stops, he sought to help Republican candidates whose election voters had no reason to think would make any great difference...
...Congressman who supports Bush...
...The then-forthcoming report was the work of a Carter-appointed team to examine the causes and lessons Gregory A. Fossedal is John M. Olin media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...Within a few hours, Bush aide Donald Gregg and the Vice President himself had reworked the text of a speech to be delivered that day at the National Press Club to include this tidbit: Qaddafi, Bush said, had loaned money to help bail out indicted drug-runner and fellow scumbag Manuel Noriega of Panama...
...When Bush says reach out to blacks," Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell noted recently, "I'm afraid he means he's going to ask black people to vote for Republicans, no more...
...One such episode was a 1983 speech Bush delivered in Austria—where he declared U.S...
...And yet, even this does not quite hit the mark...
...You don't have to be a Bush-basher to see this strain, or think you do...
...and a willingness to point out, on issue after issue, how even Democrats who may support an item veto or a sound SDI program are part of their party's inescapable ethos of budget overruns and dovish foreign policy...
...He praised the "bitter medicine' taken by U.S...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 19 vyn Krauss notes, would be "a piecemeal Europeanization" of the U.S...
...This wouldn't matter if all Bush needed was their vote...
...And experience...
...To my knowledge, a total of two reporters were there: me and someone from the Valley News...
...Bush answered: "Oh, I'm against that...
...Dole didn't...
...T he common gripe against Bush is 1 that the man is a wimp...
...That was in March...
...You bet we are...
...That's not the problem...
...But: He recognized the need for a windfall profits tax...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 in the text...
...Teeter's interest had been caught by a column Warren Brookes had published in the Boston Herald-American and the Manchester Union-Leader, blasting the commission...
...how much Bush was learning from talking to people...
...As the Greek philosopher Plato once said . . . " Lee Atwater is striding out of the Old Executive Office Building one afternoon when he is accosted by an old friend, Rick Sellers...
...Neither looked particularly formidable doing so...
...A friend of mine with a camera also came along...
...I will get you a responsive reply pre-Nov...
...Then why vote for Ronald Reagan's Vice President...
...The ambassador struck me as a bit forward: "Well, we should probably get moving," I said...
...That's well enough, but Mr...
...They like Bush...
...Robert Dornan, a congressman from Orange County, is a leading Star Warrior and was one of the first members of the House to endorse Bush...
...Greenspan, Baker, and Bush's top two economists— Feldstein and Stanford's Michael Boskin—all have career histories of leaning with the wind...
...The monetary disasters of the 1970s all came amidst repeated assurances from the Fed, Congress, and the White House that they had "learned their lessons" and would never give up "hard-won gains against inflation," and so on...
...Gray gave a brilliant speech on the Imperial Congress at a recent conference of the American Enterprise Institute...
...Furthermore, Bush himself knows nothing about monetary policy, and what's worse, thinks it's impossible to know anything unless you're an economist...
...what a wonderful country it was where he could keep in touch with a college journalist...
...administration, Bush would have been blamed...
...A large part of the reason for the crash, Reagan said, wasn't anything going on in Washington, but all those panicky brokers and their computers...
...But if Bush agrees with you and he's going to do something, then it's going to happen...
...One of his closest, Nicholas Brady, headed the Reagan commission to examine the causes of the stock market crash...
...By stressing the difference between Republicans and Democrats on this popular issue, he argues, Bush can pick up a number of votes from women, pro-defense Democrats, you name it...
...Here . . . "—Theley scribbles something on the page, hands it to Bush— "how about this...
...He brought in highly competent managers to the Republican party . . . while Mr...
...Applause...
...of the Three Mile Island accident...
...Note the tacit and confident prediction that his campaign would still 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 be rambling along then...
...Bush signed the no-tax pledge in 1987...
...The efforts of Bush, or at least his staffers, appeared to hard-working local cops as a federal credit grab, and left a sour taste...
...A few weeks later, there he went again: Bush telling an embarrassed audience that he and Ronald Reagan have "had sex together...
...Former Navy Secretary John Lehman is also a Bush intimate on defense matters...
...Asked why George Bush won the New Hampshire primary, Pinkerton said:"For a whole host of reasons, but most decisively, that he managed to create a sharp contrast with Bob Dole on three issues: One, tax increases...
...We need it, we need it...
...Under a Bush presidency, brokers rightly fear, the bashing of stockbrokers and bankers would become a major Potomac pastime...
...Sometimes "to move to the center" is simply another way of saying, "to concede your opponent's premise...
...Then he turned to me and said, "We can set up a picture here if you like...
...C ongress is a similar theme in the Bush campaign—a potentially momentous issue, but also a potential dud...
...Unfair, maybe, but true, certainly...
...efforts to work with the Salvadorans against the death squads...
...For all the complaints that Bush is a wimp, what Reaganites really fear about the man is that he is simply vague and passive...
...Bush is talking to a group of Californians who have "maxed out," giving the largest legally allowable contribution possible to his campaign...
...Could you tell us just one program or agency in the government you think should be eliminated...
...two, an oil import fee...
...Qaddafi launched into a 30-second endorsement of Bush, who would be "a better President" than Reagan because he "would not be as crazy...
...You just couldn't help liking a fellow who would put up with such crap from a 20-year-old smart aleck and still be so nice about it...
...All of a sudden, in the manner of William F. Buckley spying an old Yale chum at a cocktail party—"Keeney, my good friend...
...Supply-ciders are hopeful because of the incremental steps toward a steady-commodity price-rule pushed by Jim Baker...
...Yet there you have it...
...If it's something they feel strongly about, their vote swings—as did millions of blue-collar ballots in 1980 and 1984...
...Yet he comments: "I don't know what the Vice President would do in regards to deployment of SDI...
...Can you imagine if Bush had done this to Nicaragua...
...Pinkerton might have added that Bush not only decided to attack Dole as a tax hiker...
...That section requires the President to intervene every time he wants to stop a trade action now easily launched through an independent complaint office: up to 5,000 presidential sign-offs a year to stop all the trade skirmishes...
...Rule two is that Bush will occasionally violate rule one—but only in an area where he strongly trusts his own judgment, which is to say, mainly in foreign affairs...
...So I want to support nuclear power, keep building the plants, but first, implement the recommendations of the Kemeny commission...
...And he says that he will make his attorney general accountable for civil rights enforcement...
...Bush will go out on the point...
...Bush: "Hey, I'm passionate about education...
...It's hard to believe some in the Bush camp think that his sheer bureaucracy outdid equally organized efforts by Robertson and Dole, and at least in New Hampshire, by Kemp as well...
...The trouble is that as Vice President, as the Man of Experience, Bush is opening himself up awfully wide if he tries to make the campaign come down to a contest of repartee...
...Bush didn't give a very newsworthy answer...
...Bush brought up the commission in a conversation with Reagan the next day, and on a Tuesday afternoon, Reagan changed his tune about the report in responding to an audience question about the economy...
...Perkins closes: "To this agenda, heshould add: welfare reform, education vouchers, residential management of public housing, and criminal sentencing reform...
...Gotta run...
...But the fact is, as former Reagan adviser Martin Anderson has observed, Bush is "missing a great opportunity" if he fails to tap into the vast reservoir of scholars, activists, and writers brought into politics by the Reagan Revolution—people that John Buckley, an ex-aide to ex-candidate Jack Kemp, has aptly called "the issue nerds...
...Editorials in the Washington Post would proliferate...
...There were a lot of lines that a young Milton Friedman-type Republican (me at the time) found appealing...
...Mmmm, sounds like Reagan: Good...
...G eorge Bush was giving a speech at Lander's Restaurant in Lebanon, New Hampshire: a humid summer day, mid-July, 1979...
...The main political event between the crash and the summer of 1988, meanwhile, was the crash of Gephardt himself, and every other pro-tectionist, in the primaries...
...If there is any formulation Reaganites chafe under, it is the old left-right spectrum, a concept that, albeit useful in some ways, has clouded thinking on issue after issue...
...The memorable part of the day came after the talk...
...He-no-wimp profiles of Bush often note his 1970s establishment of Team B at the Central Intelligence Agency, a useful exercise that enabled outside academics like Harvard's Richard Pipes to scrutinize the CIA's too-low estimates of Soviet defense spending and military capabilities...
...Bush's visit to El Salvador, where he "read the riot act" about the death squads, as Morton Kondracke put it recently, is better known—and less praiseworthy...
...But: He wanted a "plowback provision" for the producers of energy...
...somebody, eventually, would have to "do something," as after the market crash...
...As delivered, these zigs and zags weren't packed quite so tightly...
...Dukakis is to the left of us on SDI, and you're telling us to move further to the right...
...If their court system was too weak and corrupt to handle the prosecutions, why not help fix the court system...
...A Carter theme there...
...Bush responded immediately to January spot ads on Bush-the-tax-hiker with not-me ads of his own...
...Yet there are other ways to "feed the hogs," as budget director David Stockman observed...
...Dear Greg—Am at 38,000 feet without typewriter . . . " one began, and that more or less set the tone for several missives on the excitement of running for President...
...Why not trust the toothy-grinned governor...
...All three men declined comment on the conversations...
...Boyd didn't mention it, but the "Scowcroft commission," in common discourse, is a panel that reported to Ronald Reagan in 1982 about the MX missile and deterrence generally...
...Bush has supported a cut in the capital gains tax rate, an example that neatly fits the model...
...The what...
...This was a risk, to say the least...
...So he didn't...
...Under a Bush presidency, brokers rightly fear, the bashing of stock brokers and bankers—the evil "speculators'"--would become a major Potomac pastime, even as assaults on Big Oil were popular during the Energy Crisis...
...The Bush campaign never did send the papers...
...At the next stop, Bush sails through, up to the passage from Thucydides, still Bush knows nothing about monetary policy and, what's worse, thinks it's impossible to know anything unless you're an economist...
...The key to my grudging but emerging respect for Bush, though, was a lot simpler...
...Greenspan and the others now at the Fed have at least a certain "institutional memory," as one supply-side economist puts it...
...Dole didn't...
...Seems to me," Bush said a few weeks before the trip, "that instead of wringing our hands about it or telling them what to do, we should help them do it...
...Consider the trade bill that returned from the dead...
...you'd need the Manhattan phone directory to sort out all the Bush-adviser tea leaves on even a straightforward issue...
...The research position is more "moderate...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 help the effort and in fact hurt...
...Asked how he would respond if Dukakis says he has enough experience not to sell arms to the Ayatollah Khomeini, Bush replied: "I'm going to say, 'Hey, the federalgovernment has spent about $10 million looking into this matter, we've had special prosecutors and the Scowcroft commission, so what's your question, Mike?' " The Scowcroft commission...
...Neato, we thought...
...Although Dukakis finally signed on to the protectionist trade bill in Congress, he was the last to do so...
...The veep's will was already done...
...These incidents suggest a couple rules of thumb about when Bush would be likely to move as President, and when he wouldn't...
...Maybe so, but in Republican administrations dominated by let's-make-a-deal types, what's politically dead today has a way of becoming policy tomorrow...
...economy: rigid labor markets, growing trade and immigration controls, high unemployment, and sluggish growth...
...The idea of proposing policies—for example, the education voucher that more than 65 percent of black voters say they favor—somehow hasn't penetrated the Bush campaign...
...About 150 people, Rotary Club types, were on hand to listen...
...If George Bush wants to help himself and Republican candidates," Zschau commented recently in his slot as a San Francisco-area TV analyst, "he'll be setting forth an agenda, talking about the future, and soon...
...For all the talk of Bush pursuing a "Harry Truman" strategy, as Pat Buchanan urges, the fact is that this idea, indeed the very same words, were employed by the Nixon campaign in 1972, by Carter in 1980, and by Reagan in 1984...
...A former assistant to Martin Anderson, Jim Pinkerton, the thirtysomething-old director of research, ranks below the upper tier of Bush aides on a flow chart...
...Snapshot: George Bush bounds off the plane and launches cheerfully into a standard stump speech on defense and the economy...
...Several Bush advisers suggested canning the speech altogether...
...In fact, a common criticism of both was that they seemed young, over-excited, and a bit shrill...
...But: Money should also be focused on developing alternative sources...
...Throughout, the slightest request from Bush to the President would have broadened the list of White House objections to include, say, Super 301—perhaps a statement that he was looking forward to a fall campaign against the new Smoot-Hawley party...
...Bush kept on, undeterred...
...Both spent much of their time, and a large share of their campaign ads, being tough on everyone else...
...Snapshot . . . Barber Conable, chairman of Bush's 1980 presidential campaign steering committee: "George's people have moved into the government in a significant degree...
...Why...
...Sellers waits for a reaction...
...Brady, though, wasn't pleased, having agreed to undertake the unpleasant assignment and then finding himself slammed by a gush of leaks obviously coming from the White House...
...Thus, by spring, Bush speeches had dropped the earlier billiard shot at Super 301...
...Voters who want real increases in spending should vote for me, Mike Dukakis...
...Atwater ponders...
...For another, politics is largely a matter of emphasis and judgment and timing...
...There's some danger, then, that a Bush monetary policy would once again become a tool not for promoting stable long-term prices, but for meeting other crises of the moment: trade deficit, slump in GNP, blip in the Consumer Price Index, you name it...
...Protectionism," Teeter told one happily surprised economist, "wins polls and loses elections...
...When trade and unemployment pressures built up in 1970 and 1971, they overwhelmed Burns...
...Why hasn't the President done anything...
...Reagan, by contrast, has badgered Congress with his own proposals, even into 1987 with the economic bill of rights...
...Former CIA man Don Gregg, the object of many Iran-contra accusations and Bush's foreign-policy right hand, suggested a substantial weakening of several key passages...
...Because of some positive stands taken much earlier...
...Early this April, Bush aides were stunned to be watching Muammar Qaddafi on the "Today" show when suddenly the host asked what the Libyan madman thought about the U.S...
...Ouch: John Connally...
...The effort is successful only when voters are told what the new Congress will do that the old one hasn't...
...Yet, by virtue of strategic insight, he is, like Roger Ailes and sometime-speechwriter Peggy Noonan, near the top in importance...
...But voters discount the old-quotes game, as Vice President "Voodoo" will remember from his own recent "kick-a-littleass" past...
...On the Saturday morning of the speech, Noonan and Teeter both dashed into a limousine to go over the text with Bush...
...Even though poll after poll suggests to politicians like Connally and Gephardt that protectionism is a winning issue, Teeter knows that there THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988is a difference between how people answer a poll and how they sift issues in a campaign...
...and, relatedly but separate, of Judd Gregg [a New Hampshire representative who chaired Bush's congressional steering committee...
...For example, Teeter has urged Bush to stick with a clean line on free trade...
...Bush also launched into a populist political attack on the very nature of such commissions...
...By contrast, Reagan banged his head against the "tax-and-spend" Democrats for years, with steadily diminishing returns...
...To my relief, he didn't snap a shot of these happenings, and the impromptu photo opportunity was broken up by some aide just as we began to press for a little more specific answer about slashing the federal leviathan...
...A later panel—the "Tower commission"—made recommendations to the President on reforming the National Security Council after the Iran-contra scandal broke...
...Now, though he has often said he wishes he were "more articulate," this is over-grim...
...A serious U.S...
...Of the top Bush aides, only Pinkerton, Richard Darman, and Bob Teeter seem capable of leaping beyond The Spectrum in discussing policy...
...We explained, a tad haughtily, that we were not representatives of the local College Republicans club, but were covering his remarks for several News Outlets...
...The dangers of running as Competent Man were well illustrated on April 26, when Bush laid out his bash-Dukakis strategy in a speech in Evansville...
...Teeley reaches the troublesome word first...
...He had the will to power, but even if it led to an occasionally odd display, this pointed to Bush's own humility, and tempered the driving ambition...
...Bush Cites 'Inexperience' in Opening a Direct Campaign Against Dukakis," Gerald M. Boyd reported the next day in the New York Times...
...negotiations would be set up...
...Reagan wants to make it the party of ideas...
...Yet in some cases, the task force hadn't even been involved...
...Okay, snap away...
...Similarly, Bush's more recent role as head of task forces on terrorism, deregulation, and reducing the inflow of drugs, are well known, and oft-cited...
...If we had evidence of thuggery against the people of El Salvador, why not hand it over to their elected representatives...
...The impression that sticks even today was one of self-conscious balance on Bush's part—balance almost to a degree of imbalance...
...Snapshot . . . The Vice President's office, early 1988...
...FDR, for example, thumped mercilessly on Republicans who dragged feet on the New Deal...
...Atwater, hurried, listens impatiently as Sellers outlines his strategy to use SDI as a Bush vote-getter...
...Another reason is that Bush is not exactly V. P. Nimble...
...An official higher up than Pinkerton, who declined to be identified, said of New Hampshire: "It was, first of all, a matter of organization...
...Bush isn't afraid to mix it up," Buchanan told the group...
...He and others clearly seem to understand that an effective campaign against Congress will involve multiple proposals...
...Bush said he supported a "free market" for energy...
...The Dow plunged on news of Reagan's blamethe-silicon explanation for the crash...
...The Soviet news agency, TASS, later labeled the comments "libelous...
...California Senate candidate Ed Zschau (whose two main TV spots lashed out against drugs and the deficit) lost by a razor margin to incumbent Alan Cranston in that race...
...Ms the Greek philosopher Thucediddedd . . . Thiduc . . . " Bush finally stumbles through the quotation without too much notice, but awkwardly...
...Respect for the United States has to be a pri-ority...
...He was the "least specific," as the Washington Post put it, in raising taxes, i.e., he didn't favor the idea...
...A good idea that virtually no politician has ever opposed, but that Bush hereby tacitly concedes hasn't been implemented in the ninety-plus months of the Reagan-Bush Administration...
...Yet the same piece noted several such attacks, and in 1988 Bush litinto fellow Republicans repeatedly and with relish...
...If the speech had ignited European worries about a radical U.S...
...Bush campaigned for an actual cut in the capital gains tax, aping Kemp...
...Even people who have doubts and reservations about Bush, such as Pat Buchanan, agree: Bush has bile...
...Bush might want to heed the Kemp-Gore tutorial on the backfiring sledgehammer—for several reasons...
...The archetypal candidate on this model would be Jeane Kirkpatrick—more of a "pit bull," as Robert Dornan implausibly refers to Bush, than a "lap dog," as George Will has called him, equally implausibly...
...Baker is smart, but hardly as tenacious as the scrappy Fed Chairman who was rolled at Nixon's dollar-suicide summit...
...They're afraid of the Bush fly-in...
...I just don't have any basis for comment...
...But in every campaign he has managed, including Reagan's 1984 effort, issues were few and far between—and Republicans fared poorly in congressional races as a result...
...I'm going to demand a line-item veto and I'm going to stick with it...
...Snapshot . . . "The Soviet Union is not seeking parity—it is seeking superiority" The speaker is George Bush, at a 1980 campaign stop in New Hampshire...
...The speech wasn't much, but it was energetically delivered...
Vol. 21 • July 1988 • No. 7
