‘Mainstream Mandate’ Being Sought by Bush : In New Role, He Plays ‘Populist Underdog’

As his campaign grows ever more confident and he appeals for “a mandate from mainstream America,” Vice President George Bush has donned a new identity.

Gone is the Reagan conservative, the Texan wildcatter, the Connecticut Yankee.

Call the newest Bush a “Wheel of Fortune” kind of guy. Call him an Arnold (The Terminator) Schwarzenegger buff. Call him, with all due apologies to his upper-class upbringing, a populist.

At least that was George Bush on Thursday, five days before the close of his marathon presidential campaign.

Bush was playing everyman’s underdog, despite holding a double-digit lead in most polls, a circumstance that has worried Democrats searching for blame and nervous Republicans whispering ever so hopefully a new L-word: landslide.

“I discount these polls, I discount these sound bites,” Bush, who has yet to deliver a speech without the made-for-television “sound bites,” said in Columbus before traveling here.

“I discount these commentators that are telling us what we think. . . . It’s the people who are gonna decide the election and it’s the people that will decide what that victory means.”

As Bush moved Thursday from Ohio to Illinois to New Jersey--all electorally important states--the phrases “I’m one of you” and “I’m on your side” worked their way increasingly into his rhetoric. And recently Bush has backed up the new focus with tailor-made events.

On Sunday, in Norristown, Pa., his longtime supporter, Teresa DeAngelis, the wife of an auto mechanic, had Bush over for lunch and toasted him as “my best friend, George.”

Talks of Farmers

Two days later, in Waukesha, Wis., he spoke of farmers as though he were a Central California farm bureau official.

“We’re going to stay by their side and not leave them until all the hard times are over!” he shouted to Dairy State residents.

And Thursday, without visible embarrassment, Bush commandeered the slogan from the Nationwide Insurance Co., on whose lawn he spoke in Columbus.

“Here we are in front of the Nationwide Building, which allows me to remind you that here at Nationwide we know who’s ‘on your side’--and it is not my opponent.”

There is a political point to the common man approach. To ensure victory, Bush must attract blue-collar and middle-class voters, the ones who might be put off by an impression of elitism or upper-crust sensibilities.

And as victory appears ever more likely, Bush is looking to forge for himself a formidable mandate. The first step, a Bush official suggested, is an upbeat, unifying message that will let Bush contend that Americans voted for him rather than against Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Thus came a startling turnabout Thursday, when after months spent pinning the “liberal” label on Dukakis, Bush suddenly reversed field.

“Leave out party labels, leave out Democrat or Republican because our appeal, yours and mine, is to the mainstream. Leave that out. . . . The labels don’t matter.

“What I am asking of the American people five short days before this election is to give me on Nov. 8 not just a political victory but a mandate from mainstream America,” he added. “I am on your side in these values.”

Just for insurance, however, he felt compelled a few minutes later to trot out two sound bites premised directly on the labels he had earlier decried.

“The liberals look at your paycheck the way Col. Sanders looks at chickens--and we are not going to raise the taxes of the working men and women of this country,” he pronounced.

And, discussing the last scrappy days of the political season:

“My opponent went on almost every TV show he could grab some time on except one: The ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ ” Bush joked. “He was afraid Vanna White would turn over the L-word.”

Those cracks aside, Bush himself went on national television Thursday, appearing for 25 minutes on NBC’s “Today” show, where he vowed that if elected he will work to “heal any wounds that might be there.”

“I think the country will come together immediately behind whoever wins this election,” he said.

Increasingly, Bush has turned away from the nasty name-calling that polls showed voters found offensive, emphasizing instead an empathy with the American public.

At its base, Bush’s message is simple: I may not be a regular guy by upbringing, but I can represent the regular guy.

Bush has in the past downplayed his upper-class roots and paraded his middle-class habits. He eats pork rinds. He throws horse shoes. He rough-houses with the grandchildren.

The effort has been given new impetus by Dukakis’ concerted drive to energize his underdog campaign by portraying Bush as a culturally privileged man whose presidency would divide the nation, benefiting the rich while ignoring the needs of those less fortunate.

Bush’s chief of staff, Craig Fuller, acknowledged that the vice president has been stung by Dukakis’ words.

“We do not think well of efforts to suggest that this campaign is somehow trying to reach out to one class or another or to divide the voters,” he said.

“It’s fair to say he’s sensitive to it,” he said. “He’s looking for a broad support. He thinks his message, he thinks what he’s stood for all his life, crosses class boundaries.”

Bush on Thursday was visibly upbeat, if a bit hoarse, as he pleaded for support from middle-class kin.

“Things look pretty good for me right now,” he told students and residents in a high school auditorium in Chicago Heights, about 30 miles south of Chicago. “I am running like I’m 10 points back. I’m going to fight for every ounce of territory left out there, every single vote.”

Bush had lunch in a Greek diner in Homewood, Ill., where reporters asked him how he thought he was doing. “You’ve been around me a year and a half and I’m always optimistic,” he replied. When someone asked if he thought he had it made, Bush replied, “No, but I do feel encouraged.”

To help him out, there was even a regular guy’s hero sharing the stage with Bush Thursday: Arnold Schwarzenegger, the well-muscled movie hero.

Schwarzenegger, a naturalized American citizen born in Austria, warmed up the crowd by pronouncing that the Democrats had left America in 1980 with “an economy that looked like Pee-wee Herman, a pipsqueak defense and a foreign policy with training wheels on it.”

“I only play the Terminator,” he growled in Ohio and Illinois. “When it comes to the American future, Michael Dukakis will be the real Terminator.”