What You Can Believe about Bush

...Bush would like to use that occasion to seal several major arms accords and as a fulcrum for more troop cuts in Europe—in concert with the Europeans' ability to forge an integrated economy and to cope with the German question...

...For all the spin-control spewing forth from this capital, even Presidential loyalists are unable to argue that Quayle is to Bush as Bush was to Reagan...

...He supplements his balanced news diet with enriched gleanings from the newsweeklies, plus a digest of what is being written about him in the American heartland and abroad...

...To keep abreast of things, Bush regularly scans five daily newspapers, including the usually authoritative New York Times and the lumpen-like New York Post...

...Moynihan's plan would reduce taxes by roughly $55 billion in the coming fiscal year, beginning October 1.) Nevertheless, key Republicans on Capitol Hill have warned the White House that GOP lawmakers up for re-election in 1990 are likely to line up in support of the tax cut...

...Can you believe this...

...Should this struggle occur, the character and confines of the so-called "peace dividend" could emerge as a major political issue in Bush's second year...

...Indeed, one outcome of the expected political turmoil may be a bipartisan compromise on Federal taxes...

...Briefly, while I sought to maintain my beleaguered station in the second row of the severely rationed American "pool," I made eye contact with the President...

...After all, neither the President's personality nor his policies have posed any great mystery...

...For example, when the Congress, under fire from a lobby of rich old people, moved last year to repeal many aspects of catastrophic health care for the elderly, the President would not touch the subject...

...If the economy continues to weaken, though, a concerned Federal Reserve will act without further prompting from the White House...

...Latin policy to highly disturbed southern neighbors...

...Legislative powers...

...A Congressional Quarterly study finds that in House and Senate votes where he took a position last year, he won the day only 63 per cent of the time...

...Meantime, a Bushbacked capital gains break for investors and farmers also would be allowed to pass, thereby spurring sagging financial and commodity markets...

...Yet he went ahead anyway, defending his step on pragmatic if not on moral grounds...

...The rollback of Social Security levies being championed by New York's Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a matter of public trust tends to leave Bush in an uneasy defensive stance...

...As East-West tensions decline, the Democratic-led Congress is seriously pondering potential defense cutbacks...

...Just as the racket began to subside, an aggressive Lebanese redhead, maneuvering to improve her line of sight to the principals, toppled a Yugoslav cameraman, triggering a final spasm of multilingual oaths from the members of the Fourth Estate...

...In the ensuing months, as several major events have unfolded, there has been a renewed burst of interest here, too, in what liberal and conservative critics alike had largely written off as an unimaginative Presidency...

...And a contrapuntal theme is voiced: "Is that a question worthy of serious pursuit...

...They just aren't buying that we need everything," she observes...

...That's the lowest success record for a first-year President since Gerald R. Ford...

...Despite his smooth personal touch, Bush's legislative record has been unimpressive...

...East-West dealings will crest at the next superpower summit, due in Washington toward the end of May...

...But amid fresh (still unleaked) policy papers and sundry intelligence gleanings, I've been getting clues that Bush feels the West in general, and the United States in particular, faces severe constraints over what it can do in shaping the course of Soviet events...

...But in contrast to most of them, he appears ready at times to shift course when criticism persists...

...But that does not make Quayle qualified to, say, explain U.S...

...Andrew J. Glass, a longtime contributor, heads the Cox Washington Bureau...

...Floodlights bouncing off the completely mirrored ceiling augmented the carnival-like air...

...Since the summit protocol in Malta inhibited either superpower from unilaterally imposing order on the assembled journalists and television camera crews, no one moved to still the trampling tide...

...White House speculation about Gorbachev's future and, for that matter, the future of the enfeebled Soviet empire remains avid...

...Perhaps the advent of Bush's second year in office and the issuanceof his first fully honed budget blueprint would have brought about the present re-evaluations anyway...

...These could reach beyond the President's present cautious planning levels, both in their timing and their scope...

...As Vice President, Quayle serves as a political lightning rod for Bush...

...he inquired, slowly nodding his head as he silently mouthed the words...

...Friendly observers maintain that he endorses change as an enlightened response to ongoing pressures...

...When they are gone, it could turn out that the United States bought in at the bottom of a market where, in any event, the Japanese and the Europeans are determined to play...

...In his initial year, domestic issues have come and gone without causing any serious tears in the nation's political fabric...

...But should he awaken to discover that a wellwired network (often CNN) or an establishment newspaper (often the Washington Post) has siphoned off the scheme before he was ready to float it himself, then the underground hunt for leakers erupts with an intensity unseen here since the dark passage of Richard M. Nixon...

...Nonetheless—and notwithstanding the Panama affair—he has given the country a more responsible administration than the one he served in so diminutively as Vice President for eight years...

...They really are thinking how do we get out of debt...

...Clearly, Bush has failed to produce the "kinder, gentler" America he promised upon taking office last January...

...On a personal level, observers say the relationship between a President and a Congress has rarely, if ever, been closer...

...In meetings with other Senators, including Democrats, the President charges the intellectually brilliant but sometimes erratic Moynihan with mounting a Mau Maustyle attack on Social Security...

...Ironically, Bush's most irresponsible act to date—a carryover, actually, from 1988—has been his installing Dan Quayle next door to the White House...

...Under an approach now being examined, Bush would agree to the Congress' scaling back Social Security rates slightly, in return for a lifting of the Social Security income cap that has been rising steadily over the years anyway and benefits mainly wealthy people...

...Bush certainly knew, however, that his decision to reopen the dialogue with the Chinese hierarchy that was severed by the bloody June crackdown on dissenters would cost him political capital, at least in the short run...

...There has always been somewhat less than meets the eye to Bush, who has long been shielded by the upper rungs of the capital's bureaucratic aristocracy...

...as a test of Executive vs...

...But he has shown a penchant for dodging vital problems that urgently need solving...

...Washington-USA WHAT YOU CAN BELIEVE ABOUT BUSH BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington When George Bush sat down beside Mikhail S. Gorbachev to hold a joint press conference in the tightly packed dance lounge of the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky last December, the media circus that has become part of the modern Presidency erupted in full-throated cry...

...Along with most of his predecessors, he dislikes criticism...

...Judge me by my choice, " Bush deadpanned during the campaign...

...Bush frequently travels to Capitol Hill—occasionally showing up unannounced in the lawmakers' dining rooms to chat, or in the Housegym, where he keeps a locker, to play racquetball...

...Whatever, with increasing frequency it is asked: "What can you believe about George Bush...

...To be sure, he has come to possess a managerial grasp of the decision-making process that eluded Ronald Reagan...

...He knows all the Senators by their first names and half of the members of the House," notes one of Bush's closest Congressional buddies, Democratic Representative G.V (Sonny) Montgomery of Mississippi...

...Late winter and early spring, an insider predicts, will be a period of "watchful disengagement...

...Some foreign policy topics, such as his veto of the bill that would have automatically extended the U.S...

...Mortality tables could have been a hidden factor in this case...

...As his pre-summit maneuvers proved, Bush likes to retire each night with a freshly minted secret or two tucked beneath his White House pillow...

...stay of the Chinese students whose visitor's visas had expired, have been reprocessed (out of an inferior grade of imported whole cloth...

...Bush will no doubt seek to outflank their neopopulist thrusts by thumping for a drop in interest rates...

...IN keeping with their Rooseveltian roots, the Democrats might very well open a second front over Bush's renewed call for a reduction in the capital gains tax, coupled with his rejection of a proposed cut in Social Security taxes...

...Unfriendly observers allege that Bush bends firmly held beliefs to quell the howls of pedigreed journalistic kennel runners and further enhance his already high standing in the public opinion polls...

...China's octogenarian leaders may not be around too much longer...

...My constituents ask, 'Isn't the Berlin Wall now a speed bump?' " says Colorado's Patricia Schroeder, a high-ranking Democratic member of the House Armed Services Committee...