Bush, a Profile in Caution, Seeks to Chart New Course

It was early enough in the morning that commuters from the West Side wards and suburbs funneling through the Jefferson Street El station may have thought they were still dreaming.

But the distinguished-looking fellow with the out-thrust hand and the preppy smile stamped on his face was no apparition. It was Vice President George Bush, ordinarily a distant and sheltered figure, making a cameo appearance in unlikely surroundings last week to dramatize his freshly announced candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

Illinois Gov. James R. Thompson, a Bush booster, hailed the vice president’s brief venture into street politics: “When a candidate for President goes to a Chicago El stop and starts talking to people, you know he’s serious.”

No one doubts that Bush is serious. The amount of money he has raised to finance his effort, roughly $14 million, is ample proof of that. Most polls give him a healthy lead over his five rivals, and he is confident enough that last week, when asked to rate his chances of winning the nomination on a scale of 1 to 10, he answered 9.

What Bush does need to prove, though, is that he can generate enough enthusiasm among Republican voters to fulfill the expectations raised by his front-runner status. And that, as Bush’s first days as an official candidate demonstrated, will be no easy task.

At times last week, as he made his way around the country, Bush seemed to zig to the center, promising to promote racial harmony from the Oval Office. At other times he seemed to zag to the right, pledging to push for a supply-side loophole in the restructured income tax code. At week’s end, Bush was still struggling to find a compass heading that would carry his message to the hearts of party activists and back up his claim to be Ronald Reagan’s legatee.

Part of the problem stems from the inhibitions built into being vice president. It would be precarious for Bush to strike out too boldly on his own, lest he seem disloyal.

Another, more fundamental difficulty is with George Herbert Walker Bush himself and the political style he has made his own for more than two decades. His is a profile in caution, a blurred outline etched through a career spent crafting compromises rather than leading charges.

Bush is scarcely unique among American politicians in his avoidance of enduring ideological commitment. Pragmatism has long been the dominant rule in both political parties, but Bush, more than most national political leaders, has allowed himself to be defined by circumstances and by his opponents.

The best-remembered example of Bush rhetoric is not some credo of his, but the epithet “voodoo economics,” coined to describe Reagan’s strategy for spurring the economy by cutting taxes. And Bush, who uttered that phrase while competing with Reagan for the 1980 GOP nomination, has been trying to recant it ever since.

Style Shaped by Past

In part, at least, the 63-year-old vice president’s style as a politician has been shaped by his much-vaunted resume. Since he left Congress in 1970 after two terms in the House, Mary Louise Smith, former Republican national chairwoman and a longtime Bush ally and admirer, pointed out, “George has never had a job that required him to take definitive positions.”

Now, of course, in seeking the White House, Bush is asking for just such a job. “The presidency isn’t like anything else,” Bush told about 500 supporters in a Des Moines hotel ballroom. “A presidency can shape an era.”

Bush sounded confident that he is ready for such a challenge. “I was elected in 1980, I felt, to support the President,” he told a meeting of Chicago party functionaries Thompson had recruited for his cause. “And I did, and I’m proud of it.

“But now,” he continued, “what I’ve got to do is say, ‘Hey, we’re shifting gears, we’re moving into the ‘90s. And here’s what I, George Bush, think are the best answers to the nation’s problems.’ ”

His strategists predict he will be able to set out those answers without giving offense to the President, his staff or his supporters.

“He is not going to separate himself from the record of the past seven years,” said Craig Fuller, the vice president’s chief of staff. “But he is going to build on that record and talk about what he thinks are unfinished items on the agenda.”

This is not the first time, though, that Bush has taken the center of the political stage and sought to establish himself as a winner in his own right. He last tried that in 1980, after his upset victory over Reagan in the Iowa caucuses. The net result for Bush was a shattering defeat.

As Bush well remembers, he entered that campaign as an unknown figure nationally, and political analysts gave him little chance. “Others were out there starting out with much more notoriety, much more national standing, than I,” he reminisced last week in his private cabin on Air Force Two while hustling from one Iowa campaign stop to another. With his unexpected success in the Iowa caucuses, which opened the GOP campaign, Bush suddenly had all of the attention he wanted. What he lacked was a message that would rally Republican voters to his side.

“Ronald Reagan ran his steamroller over me,” is the way Bush remembers the outcome of the 1980 campaign.

This time, as his aides are quick to point out, Reagan is not running. And other circumstances are altered too, or so Bush contends.

“The public mood is entirely different,” Bush said. “In 1980, I think, they wanted someone who was going to come in fresh, almost a crusader.

“But I don’t think that’s what is wanted now. People are looking for experienced leadership. They are not looking for Mr. Outside. They are looking for someone who understands the workings of government.”

Just as the political climate has been transformed by seven years of a Reagan presidency, so has Bush been changed by his experience as vice president.

“I feel more secure,” he said. “I feel more confident about what I’ve got to do. I hope I can do it a little better.” He spoke of “the inner feeling of strength that I have now, that perhaps I didn’t have seven years ago. If I can project that, added to what, hopefully, people will see as confidence and ability, then I think I will win.”

Whether or not Bush’s new-found feeling of inner strength will set the hearts of Republicans ablaze, as he hopes, it’s clear that his campaign could stand some kind of spark.

In Iowa, for example, where Bush’s personal, grass-roots campaigning won him the crucial victory in 1980 that paved his way to the vice presidency, many now view him as a relatively remote figure.

“He’s really kept to himself. He’s been in the background,” said Don Diamond, an insurance man in Marshalltown, Iowa, one of several GOP activists in that 25,000-population community who periodically share their views with The Times. “I’m really not sure about him.”

Diamond’s wife, Bonita, said of Bush: “He’s just not strong when you look at him.”

The Diamonds, like most Iowans, are still making up their minds about whom to support for President. But even among those who have already cast their lot with Bush, the level of interest and activity seems strikingly mild.

Embarrassing evidence of this emerged from a straw poll in Ames, Iowa, last month. Bush finished a dismal third, behind former television evangelist Pat Robertson and Kansas Sen. Bob Dole.

Bush’s backers were outnumbered, out-cheered and out-organized. Kurt Jackson, a Bush precinct captain in Marshalltown, was not even informed of the poll. “The first I heard about it was on television,” he said. “I would have gone.”

Bush himself acknowledges that his campaign has some catching up to do. “We’ve got to roll up our sleeves and realize we’re in a fight,” he told supporters in Dearborn, Mich., last week.

Citing the Ames straw poll, he said: “A lot of people who support me were at an air show, they were off at their daughter’s coming-out party, they were off teeing up at the golf course in that all-important last round and they were turning out at high school reunions. And the opposition forces were there in numbers and ready to do battle.”

The remark elicited an abundance of wisecracks from Iowans, many of whom found the notion of debutantes in their heartland state quite odd, and found in Bush’s explanation general evidence that some of the criticism of the vice president as an elitist candidate was well-founded.

Bush’s lieutenants in the field say that only he can get the campaign into high gear. “He needs to be less vice presidential and more of a candidate,” said State Rep. May Lundby of Marion, Iowa, near Cedar Rapids. Lundby worked for Bush in 1980 and now chairs his Linn County campaign organization. “He needs to get out and get back to the people.”

That is just what Bush was trying to do last week but the results were mixed. He won favorable notices in dovish Iowa by pushing hard for the proposed treaty to ban intermediate-range missiles.

On the other hand, Bush’s demand that people support Reagan’s treaty even before its terms were set--”(Reagan) is not going to do a dumb deal,” Bush argued--hardly squared with the impression of independence he had tried to create when he announced his candidacy in Houston earlier in the week.

There were other mixed signals too. In his announcement speech, Bush seemed to strike a moderate tone. He called for a prosperity that “touches all Americans” and a revival of idealism, and at the same time denounced “the tired old baggage of bigotry” and appealed for “a new harmony” in race relations.

Later in the week, in the South, Bush passed up the opportunity to mention race relations. Addressing supporters in Atlanta, he characterized his message to the South as “less federal intervention,” a phrase that evoked the old states’ rights argument against federal desegregation laws, along with other old-fashioned, conservative battle cries such as “less federal taxation,” and “less temptation to bemoan . . . the state of America.”

Similarly, having vowed in his announcement speech to “accelerate” efforts to trim the budget deficit, Bush two days later proposed cutting the tax rate on capital gains. The loss of revenue from the reduction, Bush said, would be more than offset by a stimulated economy.

Bush also talked about restraint in spending but, in responding to questions in Dearborn, Mich., and Seattle, he indicated a willingness to expand federal programs for education, for the disadvantaged and for the U.S. space effort.

When a woman in a wheelchair asked Bush about federal support for transit access for the disabled, Bush replied: “If it takes federal support, I think clearly everybody would support that.”

What may be more important than any substantive conflict between such proposals and views is the potential for creating an impression of being inconsistent and uncertain.

This would give further ammunition to critics who have branded Bush wishy-washy, a wimp. Bush’s friends and supporters dismiss that as a notion fostered by Washington insiders. Nevertheless, it did come up as he stumped around the country last week.

Asked about Bush’s “wimp problem” at a Chicago press conference, Gov. Thompson recalled the vice president’s exploits as a Navy pilot in World War II, when he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross after his plane was shot down.

“Ask the guys on the (aircraft) carrier whether they thought that of George Bush,” Thompson said.