Bush’s Plight: Reagan Kills an Old Issue

Is Michael S. Dukakis more skeptical about the Soviet Union than Ronald Reagan?

That’s difficult to imagine, but it certainly sounded that way at times during the Massachusetts governor’s appearance before the Atlantic Council here last week. Dukakis’ measured tones offered none of the gregarious optimism that Reagan displayed during the superpower summit earlier this month. In these days of ringing declarations about the end of the Cold War, Dukakis praised the President’s progress but stressed the need for a resolute Western alliance, warned that history is “an evolutionary and not a revolutionary process” and repeatedly reminded his audience that the United States will “continue to have fundamental differences with the Soviet Union.” Set against Reagan’s enthusiastic assertion in Moscow that differences between the two nations “continue to recede,” Dukakis appeared hopeful but cautious and centrist--more like a dour Dean Acheson than an evangelical George McGovern.

For many GOP strategists, that is a nightmare image; they need McGovern on the ballot this fall. Over the past generation, Republicans have usually had great success in polarizing presidential campaigns on ideological grounds. George Bush’s advisers have decided that the key to taking down Dukakis, who leads in the early polls, is to paint him as a elitist, “Harvard Yard” liberal, whose views reflect “the old inconsistencies of the left,” as Bush has maintained in recent speeches. If Bush can’t nudge Dukakis off the center, the vice president may never get out of the blocks.

Crime is one issue Bush can use in that effort, but it is not a decisive concern in national elections. To push Dukakis into an ideological corner, Bush, like Republican nominees before him, needs to caricature his Democratic opponent as a tax-and-spend liberal who is soft on communism.

So far the vice president has been pushing against the wind. Dukakis has refused to cooperate on the first count, avoiding major new spending programs (even his proposals for education and economic development are relatively modest) and any mention of new taxes. And though Dukakis strikes traditional liberal themes of restraint on defense spending and reliance on international law, Reagan is making it tougher on the second count by stirring expectations of a new, less confrontational era in U.S.-Soviet relations. “Where the traditional ideological battles have been,” lamented one highly placed Republican party operative, “we’re not fighting any more.”

In particular, analysts in both parties agree that reduced tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union are undermining the venerable power of the GOP’s “soft-on-communism” argument. “The international situation helps Dukakis because it removes a confrontation that conservatives have always used to appeal to swing voters,” said Stuart Rothenberg, political director of the conservative Institute for Government and Politics.

In part, the Soviet issue is receding because Reagan has provided the Democrats with inviolate political cover: It’s difficult for Bush to bash Dukakis for naivete when Reagan is hugging babies in Red Square. To get at Dukakis, Bush first has to go through Reagan, who has both renounced his “evil empire” rhetoric and embraced Mikhail S. Gorbachev as a force for change. Bush seems willing enough to scramble over his boss--the day after the California primary he rejected Reagan’s cheery assessments of the summit and questioned Gorbachev’s intentions--but he can’t push Dukakis into a corner that Reagan is already occupying.

Moreover, the room is spinning on Bush. Though Americans continue to eye the Soviets with skepticism, substantial majorities in both parties now believe that relations with the Soviet Union are improving, that Gorbachev’s policies will lead to a more open Soviet society, that the recently signed Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty was a good idea and that the strategic arms reduction talks (START) should reach agreement. “This giant issue which has dominated presidential politics (since World War II) has been essentially neutralized because . . . Reagan has re-established a genuine bipartisan consensus,” said Democratic pollster John Marttila, who has examined U.S. views on the Cold War as part of the extensive Americans Talk Security (ATS) polling project.

In urging caution, Bush isn’t violating that consensus. But in urging the United States to test Gorbachev by pushing for further agreements, neither is Dukakis. Reagan has expanded the mainstream on this issue to the point where the Democratic nominee is now safely inside it.

If anything, it is Bush who shows signs of stepping outside the new consensus. In the GOP primary, all of Bush’s opponents except Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas found themselves fighting over a narrow conservative minority of the party when they came out against the INF Treaty. In his stubborn coolness toward the warming trend, Bush could be heading toward the same mistake. “It is very easy to play to constituencies that are extra small but extremely vocal,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, “and George Bush is falling into that trap.”

Bush’s concern about demonstrating his toughness toward the Soviets--the basis for labeling Dukakis as weak--seems to have prevented him from seeing the larger picture: A clear majority of Americans considers the movement toward reducing tensions a good thing, and a personal triumph for Reagan. That could be a good thing for Bush, whose fortunes rise and fall with the Administration’s. In this discomfiting spring, Bush has found himself ensnared in the loose ends of the Reagan presidency: the Iran-Contra affair, Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III’s Sisyphean legal struggles and the unseemly entanglement with Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega. Bush has begun to resemble a long-suffering son who finds termites have wrecked the foundation when he finally inherits the family estate from the old man.

But now that Reagan has produced what Americans consider a foreign policy triumph, Bush is questioning the gift. “The tone of it is wrong,” says Marttila. “He should be arguing these are the victories of peace through strength, as opposed to rattling a cage I don’t think can be rattled in 1988.”

Satisfied with Reagan’s handling of the Soviet Union, Americans are moving their eyes to new concerns. Perhaps the most important effect of Reagan’s “Moscow spring” has been to allow discussion of foreign-policy issues long submerged by the superpower conflict. In one recent ATS survey, containing communist aggression ranked only fifth when Americans were asked to name foreign-policy priorities. At the top of the list were combating drug traffic and correcting the U.S. trade imbalance. Polls now consistently find voters believe economic power is more important than military power in determining a nation’s strength.

Though fear of the Soviets is diminishing, surveys indicate that Americans still find many world trends unsettling: the flow of drugs, the persistence of terrorism, the threats to the nation’s international economic position. With such concerns, the foreign-policy debate may be moving onto new terrain for the first time since Harry S. Truman hammered out the mainstream consensus for the Cold War against challenges from the left and the right 40 years ago. Reagan didn’t set out to leave the legacy, but then neither did Truman.