In The Beginning: BUSH

George Bush has been President of the United States for three months and he’s still “out of the loop.” Instead of dominating the national agenda like his predecessor, Bush seems to have trouble making the evening news.

On April 30, Bush will complete 100 days in office. It seems appropriate to ask the usual questions at the end of the honeymoon. Was it good for us? And was it good for him?

The answers are: It was pretty good for us. But it wasn’t so good for him.

Politically, Bush seems to have defined himself as a weak, almost passive President. The honeymoon is almost over and he hasn’t won anything. Bush has had only two experiences on his honeymoon--losing and compromising. He lost the big fight over the confirmation of John G. Tower, his first choice for secretary of defense. And he compromised at the outset on a whole range of issues: the federal budget, U.S. policy in Central America, gun control and the minimum wage.

In no instance has Bush taken a firm stand, rallied public support and gotten what he wants out of Congress. That was Ronald Reagan’s style. Bush’s style is to make a deal. He negotiates quietly, outside the glare of publicity and with as little rancor as possible. He then announces a compromise, shifts his position to accommodate the outcome and invites the country to applaud the spirit of bipartisanship and the new climate of cooperation.

Being seen as a great compromiser tends to diminish a President’s stature. He may be respected for his achievements but he loses his standing as a popular hero who inspires loyalty. It seems unlikely that people will say about Bush what one experienced observer said about Reagan. “Ronald Reagan was a successful candidate and an effective President above all else because he stood for a set of ideas,” said this admirer. “He stated them in 1980--and it turned out that he meant them--and he wrote most of them not only into public law, but into the national consciousness.”

That assessment was offered by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) on March 6 at Yale University.

A deal-making President also runs the risk of weakening his base. Conservatives were delighted last year by Bush’s hard-line, take-no-prisoners election campaign. The Reaganites concluded, “He’s one of us.”

Now they’re not so sure. He has let them down on “Star Wars,” the Contras, the Palestine Liberation Organization, gun control and the minimum wage, and they’re worried about his commitment on taxes and abortion. It cannot be said with any certainty that conservatives will be there for Bush when his back is to the wall--as they were for Reagan during the 1982 recession and the Iran-Contra scandal.

Bush also risks losing his authority with Congress. The Tower affair proved that Congress is not afraid of Bush. They defied him with impunity. The President just turned the other cheek and nominated a defense secretary Congress had no quarrel with.

To be sure, Bush has drawn the line on the minimum wage issue. He threatens to veto any increase he finds unacceptable. But listen to the way Rep. Austin J. Murphy (D-Pa.), chairman of the House labor standards subcommittee, answered the President’s veto threat. “We will send you this bill,” Murphy said last week, “and we will send you another bill and we will make you wish you did not have the power to veto.” No member of Congress ever talked that way to Reagan.

In short, Bush’s approach to the presidency is determinedly unheroic, and he is paying the price. But it hasn’t been so bad for the country. The Administration has made considerable progress on issues that seemed hopelessly stalemated during the Reagan years--Contra aid, the savings-and-loan crisis, the Middle East and, not least important, the federal budget. Bush’s “kinder, gentler” approach has paid off in a new spirit of partnership. Issues are being resolved and things are getting done without a lot of public fuss and name-calling.

With Bush, we seem to get more policy progress but less presidential authority. You could see this in the two most important policy breakthroughs of the Bush Administration--the budget deal and the Contra agreement.

The “honeymoon ceremony” held on April 14 to announce a bipartisan budget agreement was a little embarrassing. The agreement was essentially a short-term fix. Rep. William H. Gray III (D-Pa.) described it as a “help me make it through the night” approach to budgeting.

Congress and the President put together a package that reduces the 1990 deficit by $27 billion--just enough to avoid the automatic cuts mandated by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act. The deal includes a lot of accounting gimmicks, one-time-only savings, temporary expedients and optimistic assumptions about the economy. The tough choices were simply put off.

The important thing is that the agreement happened at all. “This is a first, manageable step,” Bush said, “and this budget agreement is the first such agreement reached ahead of schedule and not framed in the context of crisis.” This year’s agreement breaks the pattern of budget politics established during the Reagan years. That was an annual shoot-out. Reagan would threaten to veto taxing and spending bills he didn’t like, and Congress would threaten to slash his military budget.

Bush never went on TV to rally public support. Instead, he compromised. He gave up his campaign pledge to reduce the capital gains tax. He swallowed $10 billion in defense cuts. And he agreed to $5.3 billion in new tax revenues from unspecified changes in the tax law--but “no new taxes.” In other words, the President weakened his position in order to avoid the gridlock of past budget years. That’s not a bad trade-off.

The Contra agreement approved by Congress this month represents a complete reversal of Reagan’s Central America policy. Bush has abandoned any military solution. “We do not claim the right to order the politics of Nicaragua,” Bush said. According to one conservative critic, what Bush meant was: “We’ve sold out the Contras.”

The agreement provides $49.7 million in non-military aid to the Contras until next February, when the Sandinista government is scheduled to hold free elections. In its most controversial provision, the agreement gives Democratic committee chairmen the power to veto any continued aid after November.

The Contra agreement removes a major issue of contention between the President and Congress. To many conservatives, however, the agreement represents a betrayal of principle. The Bush Administration has repudiated the goal of overthrowing the Sandinista regime. Moreover, White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray questioned the constitutionality of the deal because it gives Congress veto power over the President.

The Contra agreement acknowledges political reality. Neither Congress nor the U.S. public supports continued military aid. Five Central American governments have signed a peace accord that calls for disbanding the Contras. Reagan never accepted those realities, and so his Central American policies were self-defeating. On the other hand, Reagan never allowed his foreign-policy authority to be so deeply compromised.

Bush is often accused of having no agenda. That is not quite true. Bush’s agenda, in both domestic and foreign policy, is to de-ideologize U.S. politics. He wants to heal the poisonous divisions that have beset America since the 1960s and return to a politics of compromise and consensus.

In his inaugural address, Bush complained that “a certain divisiveness” has emerged in our political life “in which not each other’s ideas are challenged but each other’s motives.” Bush traced this divisiveness back to the 1960s: “It has been this way since Vietnam. That war cleaves us still.”

The costs of that divisiveness were tragically apparent last week. Abbie Hoffman, the prototypical ‘60s radical, committed suicide. And in his summation to the jury, the prosecutor at Oliver L. North’s trial said, “The tragedy of Oliver North is that a man who said he cared so much about freedom and democracy in Nicaragua forgot about the demands of freedom and democracy here at home.”

Reagan was a product of the 1960s. He was elected governor of California in 1966 because of backlash against the violence in Watts and Berkeley. And when it suits him, Bush, too, can run to the right. In his inaugural address, however, Bush changed his tune, saying, “I yearn for a greater tolerance, an easy-goingness about each other’s attitudes and way of life.”

So Bush practices a politics of compromise. Compromise is the antithesis of ideology. Ideologues like Reagan and North and Hoffman see politics as a conflict of values, not a conflict of interests. Interests can be compromised. Values cannot. How can you compromise on questions of right and wrong?

Bush sees the President as the great facilitator, not the great communicator. His is an unheroic politics in which everything, or almost everything, is negotiable. Reagan believed that minimum wage laws are wrong, that Americans have an absolute right to bear arms and that the Sandinista government is an intolerable threat to U.S. security. Bush has been willing to compromise on all these points.

In Bush’s case, government by compromise is a necessity. Unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 or Reagan in 1981, Bush does not assume the presidency at a time of crisis. The voters are not demanding bold action. Nor does Bush take office with a clear mandate for change. Unlike Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Reagan, Bush was elected to succeed a President from the same party.

Moreover, Bush presides over a divided government. Both houses of Congress are controlled by the other party. As if to remind the President how vulnerable he is, the Democrats have won two House seats in special elections so far this year, and they may pick up a third next week in Wyoming. There is no way Bush can govern without the cooperation of the Democrats.

Washington may be worried about a weak and ineffectual President, but the public is not. Bush’s job approval rating is running more than 60%. Unemployment is at its lowest level in 15 years. Inflation seems to be under control. There is no foreign-policy crisis, and the only scandal in Washington involves the Democratic Speaker of the House. Maybe Bush isn’t doing much. But the American people aren’t demanding he do much.

Bush’s unheroic style seems fine--for right now. But times keep changing. Does Bush change? The evidence on this, up until now, is mixed.

During the last year alone, we have seen four different Bushes. During the primaries, we had Bush the Wimp. Then he became Bush the Tough Guy in the campaign against Michael S. Dukakis. Bush the Pro emerged during the transition--reassuring, self-confident and thoroughly professional. Now we have Bush the Fixer, the man who can pull off a deal on the budget, a deal on the Contras, a deal on everything. Sort of a Bush for all seasons. Underlying all of those seasons, however, is a disturbing passivity.

Bush waits for something to go wrong. Then he makes a deal to fix it. But sometimes you have to anticipate problems. And sometimes you have to take decisive action without making a deal or building a consensus.

Twice during the honeymoon, the Bush Administration lost the initiative. The President refused to assert any compelling public interest in the Eastern Airlines strike. Now we are faced with the likely demise of a major air carrier. And after the Alaskan oil spill, Bush delayed authorizing federal participation in the cleanup. The results were catastrophic.

The President would do well to heed the message of the oil spill: If you don’t know where you’re going, things can get sticky.