Banking on the Big Picture

While looking at the stars, does President Bush risk stumbling into the ditch?

In an often eloquent and at times visionary speech Thursday, Bush pointed his presidency toward the far horizon, pledging to work toward fundamental government reform and a global expansion of liberty that would erode and ultimately eradicate the threat of terrorism.

But by focusing more on long-term changes than immediate responses to challenges in the economy and Iraq, Bush may have left himself vulnerable to Democratic charges that he has offered few new solutions to the problems many voters consider the most pressing.

Indeed, less than an hour after Bush left the podium, his Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry, unveiled a combative new campaign speech that sought to shift the campaign focus away from the incumbent’s goals toward his record of the past four years. “It’s too late, two months before an election, to come leaping into a convention and make a bunch of promises when you haven’t even kept the promises you made before,” Kerry said at an unusual midnight rally in Ohio.

Bush’s speech culminated a Republican convention notable for its concentrated focus on national security and searing attacks on Kerry, especially in Wednesday night’s speeches from Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.).

Bush was less confrontational in tone and more expansive in subject, as he reached beyond national security to affirm broad goals of reforming government and building a society that empowered more Americans to provide for their own retirement and healthcare.

But the president offered relatively few new specifics to flesh out that “ownership” agenda, and he seemed most impassioned when defending his decision to invade Iraq and sketching his vision of how more liberty around the world could mean more security at home.

Earlier in the evening, references to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks dominated the presentations introducing Bush. And one of the night’s high points came when the campaign unveiled endorsements from 240 former generals and admirals, including retired Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That was a group 20 times larger than the dozen former generals who endorsed Kerry at July’s Democratic convention in Boston.

In all those ways, the final night reinforced the GOP convention’s clear signal that the Bush campaign believed its best hope to win another term was by convincing Americans that the president would keep them safe in an age of global terrorism -- and Kerry would not. “The basic dynamic of this race and the focus of the country is going to be on the war on terror,” said one senior GOP strategist familiar with White House thinking. “And nothing has deviated from that.”

In another respect, though, this week’s GOP gathering could mark a turning point in the campaign. After weeks of pounding from Bush and outside groups supporting him that have helped the president regain a narrow lead in several recent polls, the Kerry campaign appears to have concluded that it must now deliver a more assertive case for change.

“We have reached a new phase in the campaign where we are going to draw a sharper contrast,” said Joe Lockhart, the former press secretary to President Clinton who recently joined the Kerry camp as a senior communications advisor.

That shift in attitude was immediately apparent when Kerry at his late night rally struck back shortly after Bush’s convention speech, not only at the president’s agenda, but also in starkly personal terms. “I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and who misled America into Iraq,” Kerry said.

Those combative words -- and Bush’s jabs at Kerry on taxes, values and national security earlier Thursday night -- point toward a bruising final two months before a narrowly divided country picks its next president.

The speech was a measure of how far Bush has traveled since he sought the presidency in 2000, just six years after winning his first elected office as governor of Texas.

Delivering his acceptance speech in Philadelphia that year he seemed sometimes nervous and glazed. Thursday night, though restrained in his pacing and delivery, he projected the forceful confidence and commitment to his course that had become hallmarks of his presidency, leavened by some effective self-deprecating humor.

“The whole speech underscored his two great strengths: resolve and likability,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank.

On both domestic and foreign policy issues, Bush sought a visionary tone. He presented his domestic agenda as a response to fundamental changes in society and the economy that he argued had rendered obsolete many public and private programs meant to provide security and opportunity.

“Many of our most fundamental systems -- the tax code, health coverage, pension plans, worker training -- were created for the world of yesterday, not tomorrow,” Bush declared. “We will transform these systems so that all citizens are equipped, prepared and thus truly free to make your own choices and pursue your own dreams.”

But Bush was cautious in endorsing proposals meant to fill in that promise.

Heading into the convention, his advisors said they intended to walk a narrow line between revealing enough of a domestic agenda to combat fears that Bush would run out of energy in a second term and revealing so many details that they provided tempting targets for Kerry to attack.

In his speech, Bush sought to strike that balance with a distinctive strategy: He was vague on his biggest ideas and specific on smaller, relatively less controversial notions.

The speech’s two biggest domestic ideas were promises to reform Social Security and the tax code in a second term.

But Bush did not commit himself to any specific plan for reforming Social Security. Instead, he reaffirmed the basic principles that he outlined as far back as the 2000 campaign: providing workers the option to divert part of their payroll tax into accounts they could invest in the stock market and preserving the existing benefits for older workers.

On tax reform, another potentially major initiative, Bush was even broader, pledging only to lead “a bipartisan effort” to produce “a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system.”

Kerry aides instantly signaled that they would try to fill in the blanks themselves, by arguing that Bush’s agenda would lead to further tax breaks for the affluent and severe reductions in guaranteed Social Security benefits.

Much of what Bush discussed were ideas he had been unable to push through Congress in his first term, such as providing tax credits to help the uninsured purchase health insurance and creating tax-free accounts for savings and investment.

Bush generally offered the most new specifics on the least controversial issues. Reprising an idea from his father’s presidency, Bush called for encouraging investment in depressed communities by offering tax benefits and regulatory reductions.

Expanding on a first-term initiative, Bush called for the construction of more community health centers that served the low-income uninsured. He urged expanded efforts to enroll working-poor children eligible for the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

These ideas are unlikely to stir much controversy. But they are also unlikely to play prominent roles in Bush’s campaign -- or to blunt Democratic charges that he has offered inadequate solutions to the concerns many families feel about the economy and access to healthcare.

But even without many new particulars, Bush aides are hoping this agenda allows them to frame two broad contrasts with Kerry. On one level, they intend to present Bush as a leader committed to fundamental changes in government, and Kerry as a defender of a status quo.

More important, they want to revive a prominent Bush theme from 2000 and portray his agenda as a means toward providing individuals more opportunity and choice, while casting Kerry’s approach as a return to big government. “His policies of tax and spend, of expanding government rather than expanding opportunity, are the policies of the past,” Bush argued.

On foreign policy, too, Bush reached for the mantle of the future.

Indeed, on this terrain, the president sought an even longer view than he did on domestic issues. Bush staked a commitment to promoting freedom around the world reminiscent in its zeal of President Woodrow Wilson’s pledge about 90 years ago “to make the world safe for democracy.”

“This young century will be liberty’s century,” Bush said. “By promoting liberty abroad, we will build a safer world.”

But although the president had earlier talked about efforts to encourage civil society in the Arab world, he said nothing Thursday about how the United States could promote democracy in the Middle East or elsewhere. Nor did he unveil any initiatives for the more immediate problem of moving Iraq toward greater stability or reducing the cost of the effort in American lives or dollars.

Policy details have never been Bush’s strength, and they weren’t the center of this week’s convention, either. Breezing past the domestic proposals stacked like sandbags in the middle of his speech, he seemed to be asking the public for a more fundamental endorsement -- of his overall direction and his basic principles.

Nothing said from the podium this week, either in the president’s speech or the many that preceded it, suggested that a second Bush term would look very different from the combative first four years that had thrilled supporters and enraged critics in equal measure. If anything, the convention relentlessly underscored the president’s determination to press further along the course he had already set.

Bush’s words Thursday night presented him as an agent of change, but this week made clear he was really betting that he could build a majority on the case for continuity.