Bush Style: Goodby to Glitz

Put on your cloth coat and welcome to the era of Bush Style.

Better make that Barbara Bush Style.

She’s the one Republicans will look to as the style setter, if the Bushes move into the White House.

“The White House will be a lot less formal--which is not necessarily a bad thing,” according to author Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, who certainly travels in top social circles.

That informality would be right in keeping with Barbara Bush. White House social critics would have to trot out a whole new list of adjectives--bring on literary and low-key, and scrap glamorous and glitzy.

Stories on the grandmotherly looking Bush are not going to begin with the name of the designer she was wearing, folks agreed. In fact, her traditional-and-tweedy suburban look brings to mind the line from a long-ago Philadelphia Main Line matron who was asked where she brought her clothes. “Buy my clothes? We don’t buy our clothes. We have our clothes.”

Only one critical fashion note was sounded: “That dress. That dress was dreadful,” according to one chic California Reagan buddy, referring to the mother-of-the-bridish pink silk formal dress that the matronly Barbara Bush wore for her arrival here Tuesday. (The critic did add: “Those pearls, though, were wonderful--and there were three strands.”) What Republicans here want to stress is not the fashion, but the life style of the Bushes--and, surprisingly, criticisms (how-quickly-they-forget) abound of the contradictions between the emphasis on family life espoused by the Reagans and the difficult relations with their own children.

“George and Barbara and all their family are all the things that Ronald Reagan talks about,” said one California elected official who did not want to be quoted by name. He pointed out the Bushes’ decades-long marriage, their close family involvement, the constant presence in their everyday life of their five children and 10 grandchildren.

Oil magnate Michael Huffington (who began his association with Bush as a Stanford congressional aide in 1968) said that a real concern in Bush’s running for President was how “time would be taken away from his grandchildren.”

Children would be on the social agenda, according to Aviva Covitz, who will return to Los Angeles when her husband, Carl, finishes his stint as undersecretary for Housing and Urban Development. “With their children and grandchildren, there are going to be a lot of young people being brought into the White House.”

“She’s a family Republican,” state Sen. Bill Campbell said. “As those of us in politics know, the main responsibility of raising the family goes to the wife.” (He did not explain who was responsible when it was the wife who was elected to office.) Campbell was very clear that there would be “a change” in White House entertaining.

One change would be who gets invited. The Bushes, after years in Washington and on the Hill, have dozens of close D.C.-based friends--including Democrats. B. A. Bentsen, the wife of Lloyd Bentsen, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, has been close to Barbara Bush since George Bush was a Texas congressman in the 1960s.

And new big givers as well as a wider range of elected officials would get a chance to fill the California spots on the guest lists for White House formal dinners--the places that seemed to get constantly filled with Reagan Kitchen Cabinet members.

But don’t expect a complete end to L.A.-type glitz, since Jerry and Jane Morgan Weintraub along with Texans Bill and Georgette Mossbacher (she is the president of La Prairie cosmetics) would surely be consistently invited.

And don’t expect an end to formality--since this would be a Republican White House. John Cushman of San Marino stressed that--adding that there certainly wouldn’t be a return to the down-home folksiness of the Carter years, when the President shocked him by “entertaining without a tie or jacket.”

One Bush adjective that got heavy use was courteous . Arco President and CEO Lod Cook said that the vice president drops personal notes, makes his own phone calls, remembers with amazing skill the first names of family members. And, as everyone kept stressing, manages to spend a great deal of time with his own family.

And how would the Bushes change Washington?

“Well,” Arianna Huffington said, “Washington--Washington just goes on.”

PARTY NOTES--It was billed as the 1988 Conservative Victory Dinner and set for Tuesday night in a massive white tent across from the New Orleans Museum of Art. Only trouble is, that was the night that conservative favorites like former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and televangelist Pat Robertson spoke before the convention across town. Perhaps that--and the $1,000 ticket price--accounted for the 20 unused tables among the 60 set for dinner. Of course, for those who did make it, there was wonderful unscheduled entertainment--watching preacher Jerry Falwell, at a stage-front table, as impressionist Rich Little did his evangelist-Swaggart imitation. (Falwell seemed intent on his dessert during that part ofLittle’s act--and left before Little finished his performance.)

. . . The home of Rep. Lindy Boggs is a landmark house on Bourbon Street, set between the sex shows and the T-shirt shops. Once back into the home’s center court, however, and it is another era in Southern comfort. Boggs, a Democrat, has lent her home for several parties during the convention week--to her son, Washington lawyer-lobbyist Tommy Boggs, and to real-estate magnate and developer David Murdock. Guests walking between desks and tables crowded with silver frames, keepsakes and mementos were amazed that she had left such obviously pricey stuff about. “Of course,” one cynic said, “we are Republicans.”