The Arena for a Honeymoon

What is President George Bush going to do on his honeymoon? A lot of people in Washington were asking that question last week. That could be a problem. If you are going on a honeymoon and people are wondering what you’re planning to do, you’re in big trouble.

For a President, as for most newlyweds, a honeymoon is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A newly inaugurated President has a fresh reserve of political capital. His popularity rating is likely to be extremely high. And that is a President’s principal source of power in Washington.

When a President is popular, he can be bold. Franklin D. Roosevelt had his first “Hundred Days,” when he demanded and got much of the legislation defining the New Deal. Dwight D. Eisenhower went to Korea. John F. Kennedy used his honeymoon to establish the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress--as well as to try an impetuous invasion of Cuba. Lyndon B. Johnson called for the Great Society; he also started bombing North Vietnam. Ronald Reagan “hit the ground running,” with a radical program of tax cuts, military expansion and domestic retrenchment.

Bush, according to one Washington wag, has “hit the ground coasting.” The new President says he has no special agenda for the first 100 days. He prefers to take the thematic approach, defining himself in terms of symbols and values rather than programs. Bush reiterated his themes of “a kinder, gentler nation” and “a thousand points of light” in his inaugural address on Friday. “A thousand points of light?” Michael S. Dukakis said during last year’s presidential debates. “I don’t know what that means.”

What it means is that George Bush is not Ronald Reagan. He doesn’t see issues as “us” versus “them.” He doesn’t talk about evil empires and welfare queens. Bush is more sensitive to social injustice and economic deprivation. In a recent interview, Reagan wondered aloud whether civil-rights leaders might be exaggerating the amount of racial prejudice in the United States. Bush told the nation on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday last week, “Bigotry and indifference to disadvantage will find no safe home . . . in our public life.” Reagan says that the unemployed are too lazy to read the want ads and that many people choose to be homeless. Bush called homelessness “a national shame.”

During the Reagan era, greed and materialism seemed to dominate the popular culture. Bush gently repudiated those values when he said in his inaugural address, “We are not the sum of our possessions.” Barbara Bush even got into the symbols-and-values act. She showed off her ample figure and her new designer clothes, saying to her audience, “Take a good look.” After this week, she had no intention of trying to be a glamour-puss. Now with whom could she be comparing herself?

Bush got through the 1988 campaign on symbols and values. They were far different symbols and values of course--criminal furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance, the American Civil Liberties Union, the death penalty and the menace of liberalism. It worked. So maybe he doesn’t need an agenda. Maybe he can define his presidency in terms of symbols and values.

In his inaugural speech, Bush said, “We have work to do,” and ticked off the nation’s problems--homelessness, child poverty, crime, drug addiction. He called for “a new activism, hands-on and involved, that gets the job done.” But people are wondering, “What is he going to do?” For one thing, he will not spend a lot of money. “The old solution . . . was to think that public money alone could end these problems,” Bush told the nation. “But we have learned that is not so . . . . We have more will than wallet; but will is what we need.” We’ll do it with symbols and values.

Bush says he will be defined by the kinds of events he chooses to attend. The first event of the official inaugural program last week was a speech to a group of teachers from around the country. Bush repeated his pledge to become known as “the education President.” But he made no specific commitments, citing “the budget crunch that we’re living under.” “We will look for success stories and share them,” said Lauro F. Cavazos, Bush’s nominee for secretary of education.

If Bush has some grand policy design, he’s letting few people in on it. As one of his key domestic policy advisers put it, “George Bush is the only man in town who knows precisely what he wants his presidency to be about.”

To an alarming degree, others seem to be setting the agenda for the Bush presidency. Congress is setting the agenda on the deficit. Mikhail S. Gorbachev is setting the agenda on East-West relations. The Europeans and the Japanese are setting the agenda on trade. The Palestine Liberation Organization is setting the agenda on the Middle East.

The kinds of people Bush has chosen to staff his Administration are not agenda-setters. They are problem-solvers. Like Bush himself, they offer strong qualifications and considerable experience. But no bold new ideas.

What we will get from the Bush Administration is professionalism. That’s not such a bad thing, considering that professionalism was often conspicuously missing in the Reagan Administration. Reagan appointed too many ideologues who had their own private agendas, people like James G. Watt, Elliott Abrams, Edwin Meese III and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. And, of course, Oliver L. North, whose agenda was so private that the President claims he didn’t know anything about it.

Consider one point of contrast between Bush and Reagan. Reagan made sure that the people in sub-Cabinet positions were reliable conservatives. Sub-Cabinet officials seldom make news, but they usually make policy. Under Reagan, sub-Cabinet appointments had to be cleared through a central office to make sure only true-believing Reaganites got jobs. Bush, however, is not making any effort to control those appointments. He is telling Cabinet officers to choose their own people.

The Bush agenda is beginning to look like a cleanup operation. His Administration is dominated by reformers and incrementalists, people like Bush himself, who see their jobs as cleaning up the problems Reagan created. We will have an ethics commission to deal with conflicts of interest. We will bail out the nation’s financially troubled savings-and-loan industry. We will clean up our nuclear power plants. We will encourage businesses to concentrate more on productivity and less on quick profits.

A lot of people assume this is pure pragmatism, a return to the Eastern Establishment tradition of non-ideological politics. Not quite. Reagan has conservatized the Republican Party, and everyone Bush has appointed is well within the Reagan consensus. His secretary of state nominee, James A. Baker III, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, “Some have described my philosophy as pragmatic . . . . I am actually a Texas Republican, all of whom are conservative. I will admit to pragmatism, if by that you mean being realistic about the world and appreciating the importance of getting things done.”

Baker sounded like Reagan when he warned, “The Soviet Union remains a heavily armed superpower. Where we have not raised the cost of adventure or aggression, we see little evidence of change.” Bush sounded like Reagan in his inaugural address when he talked about “the exercise of free will unhampered by the state” and when he “blessed” the mothers of unwanted children for “choosing life.” Richard G. Darman, the incoming budget director, sounded like Reagan when he insisted that Bush would rule out anything ordinary Americans would see as a tax increase. “It’s a tax increase if you apply the duck test,” Darman said. “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”

In other words, Reagan is setting Bush’s ideological agenda. With one important difference: Bush wants Reagan’s ideology without Reagan’s divisiveness.

Reagan was a creature of the 1960s. He was first elected governor of California in a wave of anger over racial violence (Watts) and student protests (Berkeley). Reagan saw politics as “us” versus “them.” In his speech, Bush lamented the “divisiveness” that has dominated U.S. politics for the past 25 years. He claimed “the statute of limitations has been reached” on Vietnam, the core symbol of that divisiveness. Bush called on the nation to end the 1960s. “A new breeze is blowing,” he said. “This is the age of the offered hand . . . . I yearn for a greater tolerance, an easygoingness about each other’s attitudes.”

So the ideology is Reagan’s ideology. The agenda is Reagan’s agenda. But the symbols and values are those of Bush.

Bush is trying to hold two different constituencies together. He ran a tough, hard-hitting, right-wing election campaign scripted by his media adviser, Roger Ailes. His campaign--including the selection of Dan Quayle as his running mate--enabled him to keep Reagan’s conservative coalition together. Reaganites looked at Bush and said, “He’s one of us.”

Bush used his transition to reassure the Washington Establishment that he was really a cautious pragmatist. The transition seemed to be scripted by Baker. “Good old George,” the Washington power elite said to one another. “He’s one of us.”

Well, which is he? Both sides are waiting for the payoff. If he doesn’t make his priorities clear, Bush could end up like Jimmy Carter. Carter couldn’t survive the inevitable setbacks of his presidency because he had no base. Small failures became big problems. What will happen to Bush if the economy goes into a tailspin? Or if Gorbachev is suddenly deposed? Bush needs to build up his political capital. And that is easiest to do now, while enjoying his honeymoon.

The message of Bush’s inaugural address was that after eight years of Reagan, we have had enough vision for a while. The Bush presidency is like a second marriage. It’s time to be practical. We have a deficit looming over the national agenda. It could do to the Reagan Revolution what the AIDS tragedy did to the sexual revolution.

Bush is telling us we have to be careful. On this honeymoon, the big thrills are over.