‘Quietly Effective’ on Tough Issues : After 100 Days, Bush Leaves Few Footprints

In one campaign advertisement last year, he was portrayed as the figure who left no footprints. In caricatures by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, he remains a disembodied voice. And even as they elected him, many Americans said last year that they were not at all sure what kind of a President George Bush would be.

Now, as Bush’s presidency approaches the traditional 100-day assessment point Saturday, they are beginning to find out. At least compared with such dynamic predecessors as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, Bush is proving to be a decidedly passive President, yet one who thus far has been effective in handling some historically difficult issues.

He is a chief executive content to deal with problems as events bring them to him, not a leader who seeks to use the Oval Office to control the public agenda. In short, he is still leaving few footprints.

“He seems to be almost sleep-walking through the role,” said University of North Carolina historian William E. Leuchtenburg. “You have to stick a pin in yourself to remind yourself that Bush is President. You would suppose there are some things he’d want to spell out, and we don’t know what they are.”

At the same time, again in contrast to Reagan, Bush is proving to be an active manager, in control of the White House machinery and at home with the issues of government. Leuchtenburg conceded that Bush has been “quietly effective” in reaching compromises with Congress on non-military aid to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels and a package of steps to reduce the federal budget deficit.

And so far, said Michael Robinson, a professor of government at Georgetown University, “he hasn’t made any really serious blunder.”

Bush’s advisers wish that the 100-day yardstick had never developed. It may have been appropriate to Roosevelt, they say, because he took over from a President of the opposite party in time of national crisis and was a whirlwind for his first 100 days. But Bush succeeded his own political mentor, and he never promised a radical change of course.

“You’re not seeing abrupt changes,” said Stephen Studdert, the President’s assistant for special events and initiatives. “You’re seeing some fine-tuning.” The White House staff, he said, regards itself as at the end of “the first quarter of a 16-quarter game.”

Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker is willing to wait for the game to proceed a little further.

“If these people are saying, ‘We’re new at the job, we want to learn,’ I can accept that,” he said. “But there’s an alternative--that there is a deficiency of vision, of where he wants to take America.”

Distinctive Style

In his personal conduct, Bush quickly established his own distinctive style of leadership--more casual than Reagan’s, more down-home. Into the nooks and crannies of the White House he invited tourists and members of Congress, reporters and grandchildren. He showed off his new puppies and his horseshoe pit. On at least one occasion he replaced the shiny black presidential limousine with one of a more diffident gray.

“He does not want the appearance of a regal presidency,” said a senior White House official.

The spontaneity he demonstrates almost daily in his personal life contrasts sharply with the ordered, scripted White House days of Ronald Reagan. It also differs markedly from his approach to his duties, which his aides describe with such words as “prudent” and “methodical” and “pragmatic.”

His low-key, non-confrontational style has enabled him to make a promising start at forging agreements with the Democrats who control Congress on such previously divisive issues as the budget and Central America.

Rutgers’ Baker, who specializes in the relationship between the presidency and legislative branch, described the different approaches toward Congress of Reagan and Bush as “the difference between Capt. Bligh and Capt. Kangaroo.”

Yet Bush has offered no bold legislative program--nor shown any indication that he will. Some of what he has offered has drawn criticism as being inadequate.

Although he and congressional leaders announced their budget accord with great fanfare, their package has been roundly criticized as making little headway toward obtaining a long-term solution to the deficit.

The deficit also has limited his ability to solve perceived problems. His major domestic policy initiatives--a child-care tax credit for the working poor and a package of education proposals including an increase for Head Start--strike critics as insufficient to meet the needs.

When Bush discussed his child-care proposal during a speech in Palo Alto earlier this week, a woman in the audience commented: “The low-income get help, the rich don’t need help and the rest of us have to pay for it.”

In the arena of foreign affairs, Bush frequently has temporized. With Western European allies pressing for signs that the United States is ready to take advantage of more liberal Soviet policy, the new President has steadfastly refrained from altering U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union until his aides complete a study of East-West relations.

Sympathy for Big Business

Like Reagan, Bush has displayed traditional conservative Republican instincts, including a marked sympathy to big business in such cases as the Eastern Airlines strike and the Alaska oil spill. But unlike Reagan, he has shown little inclination for ideological crusades.

He has brought into his Cabinet an experienced group of government insiders and has let them take the lead on--and receive the credit for--new policy developments. Some, most notably Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner and Richard G. Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, have used that independence to establish favorable reputations for themselves.

Looking back to another Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Rutgers’ Baker remarked: “I can’t imagine anyone in the (Eisenhower) Cabinet getting up and criticizing a major oil company the way Sam Skinner did.”

But it was Eisenhower on whom Bush has said he might want to model his Administration. Parallels are already apparent, said Stephen Ambrose, an Eisenhower biographer.

Shares Ike’s Theme

The chief characteristic of the Bush Administration thus far, Ambrose said, “appears to be compromise and conciliation and a sense of a theme that Ike felt very strongly after the tumultuous years of the Depression, World War II and the Korean War--that the nation needed to calm down and catch its breath.”

By the same token, Roosevelt is precisely the wrong place to look for an antecedent to Bush. In the Depression year of 1933, his aides say, a President could hardly avoid the dramatic and Roosevelt pushed through much of his New Deal through Congress in his first 100 days. But in 1989, Bush’s staff says, times are good, and Bush faces no need to generate a sense of national emergency and excitement.

“Things are moving,” the President himself repeatedly says. “I don’t feel under any pressure.”

A senior White House official described Bush’s outlook this way: “You’re trying to get a handle on the biggest problems you confront and deal wisely and well with those (unplanned) things that occur, and establish the leadership of the President as head of the government. You want to be able to demonstrate (that) this person . . . has the problems in hand and is dealing with them effectively.”

Another senior official said that Bush has chosen to confront problems--education, the environment and illegal drugs--that do not lend themselves to quick solutions. About the only way a President can make a dramatic gesture on these issues, the aide pointed out, is to promise to spend large amounts of money, which Bush is unwilling to do.

Circumstances forced Bush’s hand on at least one domestic issue--the nation’s hundreds of insolvent savings and loan associations. After considerable consultation with Congress, he proposed a complex and far-reaching plan that has sailed through the Senate largely intact. While it faces some roadblocks in the House, its chances for enactment look good.

Some issues, however, may have such enormous emotional content that they resist Bush’s consensus approach. Gun control is one.

After campaigning for years against federal limits on firearms, Bush began early in his Administration to move toward controls on at least some semi-automatic weapons. He cautiously signaled his position in a series of ambiguously worded declarations.

The reason for the ambiguity, senior White House aides said, was to pressure all sides in the gun control debate--primarily the National Rifle Assn. and police organizations--to seek agreement, without applying so much public pressure that it would create a backlash.

But the opposing sides may be too deeply entrenched for that approach to work. Advocates on both sides of the issue are looking for the President to put forward his own solutions and lead the nation toward them.

With 100 days behind him, Bush has not yet found himself forced to do that on gun control or any other issue. Critics doubt his ability to rise to the occasion when the occasion demands it. But the same opponents who have portrayed Bush as a mystery man have always tended to underestimate him.