Catching Public Fancy Early Is Key Bush Task

To ensure a place in history and in the hearts of Americans, according to a modern political axiom, a new President must catch the fancy of the public with new and imaginative ideas that he swiftly implements, preferably in the first 100 days.

The recent examples are several--Franklin D. Roosevelt with his social and economic legislation and the New Deal, John F. Kennedy with his Peace Corps and New Frontier, Ronald Reagan with his supply-side economics and conservative revolution. All three used ideas to fire the public mind and win political leverage against Congress and other potential foes.

“To pass a precedent-shattering program, a new President needs to act while his influence is at its zenith,” said Larry J. Sabato, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia. “And he must formulate that program in a way that captures the public imagination.”

Now it is George Bush who faces the challenge of developing galvanizing ideas for his Administration.

And the task is all the more difficult because Bush, unlike Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan, spent relatively little time during the election campaign showing himself to be a leader well armed with new ideas to meet the nation’s needs.

“I want a kinder, gentler nation,” he said. He pledged to be “the education President” and promised a “flexible freeze” in spending to combat the budget deficit.

But he offered few specifics on what these phrases meant. Asked since his election what he plans to do in specific policy areas, he frequently has responded that he has not yet studied the options in detail.

His defenders brush the problem aside. A Bush transition official recently lifted a weighty copy of “Leadership on the Issues,” a 347-page compilation of the campaign speeches and policy statements of Bush, and remarked, with some annoyance: “I think we got a bum rap on the issues.” All the major ideas that the new Bush Administration will need in its first 100 days, the official said, are outlined in the book.

The official, however, also acknowledged that copies of the book have hardly made an impact in Washington. “There are not 30 people in the departments that have them,” he said.

Selecting Personnel

And there is no evidence that anyone associated with Bush, whether armed with the book or not, is working hard to detail the ideas that will stamp the new Administration. Almost all the energy of the transition team has been channeled to selection of personnel for a new Administration, not to pumping it full of ideas.

Even Education Secretary Lauro F. Cavazos, who will keep his job in the new regime, has not yet made plans to call a national conference of governors on education or to join the Treasury Department in writing legislation for a college savings bond program--two of Bush’s campaign promises.

Although experts agree that presidents need new ideas, no one has a formula for how to come up with them. And the histories of presidencies are too contradictory to help.

“There is no shortage of ideas out there,” said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, a specialist on the presidency. “ . . . There are ideas that bubble up through the bureaucracy. There are ideas waiting to find their rabbi. But the system is almost inherently chaotic and nobody knows how to get from here to there. So everyone is bombarding the ear of someone who may have the ear of someone else.”

Bush’s problem is compounded by the record of his predecessor. Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 determined to transform government. He struck swiftly with a few simple and dramatic ideas that reflected his instinctive feelings about what was needed.

The most celebrated idea was supply-side economics, a theory devised by University of Southern California economist Arthur B. Laffer and others in the 1970s that a cut in tax rates would eventually bring in more rather than less revenue by generating economic prosperity. Most economists ridiculed the idea but it was embraced by Republican Rep. Jack Kemp of New York who in turn found a ready convert in Reagan, the presidential candidate.

Appealed to Reagan

The idea appealed to Reagan because, if it worked, it could be the engine of his presidential program. He could cut taxes, increase defense spending enormously, reduce some domestic programs and, according to the supply-side theory, still balance the budget. This became Reaganomics, drummed incessantly by Reagan as candidate, flaunted by Reagan as the new President and then enacted swiftly into law in the first year of his Administration.

In the end, it did not work, at least not economically. Reagan’s tax cuts and defense spending failed to trigger massive new growth; what they did do was produce the largest budget deficits in U.S. history. Yet the President has still refused to call the supply-side economists or himself into question. Instead, he blames Congress, the press and special interest groups.

Despite the economic failure, there is little doubt that all the early excitement and expectancy over Reaganomics established the image of Reagan in the first months of his first term as a President who knew how to rally the public to his side and to force a cowed Congress to do things his way.

No analyst expects Bush to try anything similar. As vice president under Reagan, he cannot ostentatiously stand Reagan policies on their head. Moreover, Bush is looked on as a pragmatic, non-ideological, cautious politician, one not fond of dramatic gestures.

The Reagan model is often cited by those who believe that the election campaign is the only true crucible of presidential ideas. Discussing the way an Administration generates ideas, Stuart E. Eizenstat, a lawyer who was in charge of domestic policy for President Jimmy Carter, said recently that a President-elect must make clear what he has in mind during the campaign.

“It is difficult to create it out of whole cloth later,” he said. He called the shortage of ideas in the campaign “one of the problems of Bush.”

“In a campaign,” Eizenstat said, “you sit around and say: ‘We have to come up with something. We have to say something.’ ” Those ideas, he said, come “by osmosis” from intellectual movements, universities, think tanks, Congress and even the experiences of other countries.

Once the election is over, Eizenstat said, “you are trying to consolidate what you have, not going around to look for more ideas. That doesn’t mean that you are brain dead for four years.” But, he insisted, the transition and the first 100 days of a new Administration are not the moments for focusing on anything brand new.

Carter, he said, proved that. Late in December, 1976, Carter announced sweeping energy conservation proposals that he had never mentioned in the campaign. The public and Congress were not prepared for the proposals, Eizenstat said, and Carter met strong resistance.

“That underscores the danger of coming up with something new that you didn’t campaign for,” Eizenstat said. “It’s dangerous and risky. It dragged us down substantially.”

And first impressions of a new President, Hess said, are critical. “What a President does in his first few months in office,” he has written, “is apt to cast his image in a mold that is extraordinarily difficult to recast.”

Far From Feverish

The Bush transition has a system of policy development in place, but its atmosphere is far from feverish.

Every department and agency is preparing memos for James P. Pinkerton, the 30-year-old director of policy development for the transition. The memos include an analysis of major policy issues facing the department or agency and a calendar of the major events, decisions and milestones that lie ahead in 1989.

On top of this, an official known as a transition office contact has been assigned to every department and agency as a kind of liaison between the outgoing and incoming administrations.

Transition officials acknowledge that all this amounts to no more than “information exchange.”

Hess of the Brookings Institution ridicules it. “That’s not a serious exercise, as far as I am concerned,” he said.

The development of the kinds of ideas that might excite the public must come from a higher level. But Bush and his top advisers, including Secretary of State-designate James A. Baker III, Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady and White House Chief of Staff-designate John H. Sununu, have had personnel on their minds.

By the second week of December, Sununu said that the group had started looking at some policy initiatives, albeit in preliminary fashion.

Status of Ideas

Bush himself may have placed the status of his government’s ideas best in reply to a question at a news conference on Dec. 15. Asked what he intended to do about the homeless, he said: “It has not been addressed in a specific meeting yet. We’re in the process now of trying to select the people to cope with these issues. It is a national shame and I’d like to feel we would address it with sensitivity and the needed compassion. But I have not gotten into that . . . yet.”

Even in education, where Bush sounded some specific campaign promises, he has nothing yet to propose.

During the campaign, Bush promised to call a national governors’ conference on education, to create a college savings bond program, to spend $500 million on awards to schools that improve education and to increase funding for Head Start, magnet school and experimental programs.

Since the election, Education Secretary Cavazos, the first Latino ever to serve in a Cabinet, has underscored Bush’s pledge to become the “education President.” Bush “feels very strongly about this and is going to make it the centerpiece of his Administration,” he said.

So far, however, little has been done on details. Decisions have to wait until budget limits are determined and personnel have been selected. Cavazos, appointed by Reagan earlier this year, has been asked by Bush to remain as secretary, but the undersecretary, deputy undersecretaries and assistant secretaries have not been named.

Cavazos says that he has met with Bush to discuss some of his campaign proposals and the problem of bilingual education but not to discuss the budget. The secretary has been soliciting advice from many leaders in American education.

He says that he is watching experiments in Minnesota, which allows parents to send their children to any school anywhere in the state, and at Boston University, which has signed a contract to run the troubled school district of Chelsea. But he has not yet reached any conclusion about either.

The department is “reaching out for ideas,” said Bill R. Phillips, the secretary’s chief of staff, but “nothing has jelled so far.”

The tradition of measuring a President by what he accomplishes in the first 100 days comes from Franklin D. Roosevelt, who pushed more significant legislation through Congress in his first 100 days than had ever been passed in a similar period in American history.

Roosevelt ‘Brain Trust’

Roosevelt did much of this with the help of what became known as the Brain Trust--a small group of professors, mainly from Columbia University, who supplied him rapidly with social and economic ideas that could be used to attack the Depression and revive hope.

Some analysts believe it is not fair to measure presidents against what Eizenstat calls “the first 100 days mythology.” The United States is not now in the midst of a crisis, and in the 55 years since Roosevelt’s first 100 days, Bush is the first elected President to succeed a President of the same party. As such, he is not trying to prove that he is radically different from his predecessor.

Nevertheless, Bush will be measured by what he proposes and achieves in his first 100 days, and he will need ideas to mobilize public and congressional support. “The 100 days,” said Hess, “is all about getting a fast start.”