Bush Parts From a Reagan Policy, Backs Student Aid

Vice President George Bush, gingerly putting distance between his campaign program and the Reagan record, called Saturday for a reversal of current cuts in federal spending for higher education.

The vice president, an undeclared candidate for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, said in a commencement address at St. Louis University that one of the nation’s priorities in the 1990s should be helping families pay for their children’s college educations.

Federal spending on higher education--particularly the student loan program--has been slashed in the Reagan Administration’s budget-cutting effort. President Reagan’s 1987 budget allocated $16.8 billion to such programs, $900 million less than the 1986 outlay of $17.7 billion. It proposed a further cut in fiscal 1988, to $14.7 billion, with $1.8 billion of the savings coming out of student aid.

Both houses of the Democratic-controlled Congress have passed budget resolutions that would reverse those cuts, but final amounts have yet to be reconciled.

“Many middle-class families are struggling to come up with enough resources to meet the escalating costs of college,” Bush said in his speech. He did not acknowledge that declining federal aid to help pay tuition was a factor contributing to the problem.

In staking out his own campaign themes, Bush faces the dilemma of the loyal lieutenant: He must demonstrate that he is his own man without appearing to criticize his boss.

The last two vice presidents who tried to move up while in that office--Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968 and Richard M. Nixon in 1960--failed, partly because neither was able to navigate that tricky political channel.

In a brief, airport press conference after his St. Louis speech, Bush said he agreed with current education spending policies but wanted to map out a new strategy for the future.

“I support strongly what we’re doing now,” he said, “but I’m trying to look out beyond the 1980s.”

Bush is using seven college commencement addresses he is to make this month to introduce what he calls the “broad general principles” of his 1988 campaign. He said that specifics would come later.

In the three speeches he has delivered so far, Bush has sketched an approach that appears to be thematic rather than programmatic, thus following a political strategy that underlay Reagan’s two successful presidential campaigns.

His themes have included restoring America’s ability to compete in a global economy through better schooling, and increasing spending on technological research and application.

In St. Louis on Saturday, Bush said that “education will be America’s most effective economic program, our most powerful trade program, our most productive jobs and anti-poverty program. It will be the way we out-compete anyone.”

“Another key to our future prosperity is technological pre-eminence,” Bush said. “Technology is America’s economic fountain of youth.”

Bush also took the opportunity to capitalize on the latest political fashion--the “character issue.”

Political analysts have attributed the fall of Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart, after he was seen with Miami model Donna Rice, to a failure of character.

“Americans cannot accept knowledge without character,” Bush told the St. Louis laureates. “We must not accept commerce without morality. We must not accept politics without principle.”

In his remarks to reporters, Bush denied any complicity in the Iran- contra affair. He said he had not known that staff aides had met secretly with CIA operatives involved in the clandestine arming of the Nicaraguan rebels.

“I don’t worry about my own neck in all of this, because I’ve told the truth from the very beginning,” Bush said. He added that he did not believe that Republican chances of retaining the White House next year had been hurt by the Iran affair.