Breaking Rules Can Make You a Prince : Bush: He’s lousy on TV, has no domestic agenda, is non-ideological--and Americans still love him.

Don’t let the trappings of the presidency fool you. George Bush is still a goofy guy.

But if the public holds Bush’s goofy streak against him, there’s no evidence of it. His popularity is extraordinarily high after one year in the White House.

Many of Bush’s aides had expected a significant drop in his glittering poll numbers in the fall. A dip after eight or nine months is normal for a rookie President. But it didn’t happen, or did just barely. In the CBS/New York Times poll, Bush’s favorable rating fell from 69% to 63% from September to November. In the Gallup Poll, it rose, from 68% in October, to 70% in November, to 71% in December following the Malta summit with Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Bush has stood the rules for success in the White House on their head. He’s violated nearly every rule learned from Ronald Reagan’s presidency--and gotten away with it. I can’t explain it, except to say that the rules were wrong.

The most widely accepted rule, based on Reagan’s experience, is that a President should stick to a few themes, not go off in a dozen directions. Neither Bush nor his chief of staff, John H. Sununu, bought this. When junior staffers at the White House advocated the few-themes approach last winter, Sununu reacted angrily. “Hey, we can’t do that because government doesn’t work like that,” he snapped. That ended the discussion.

Bush has ignored two other rules of strategy: that a new President should move on domestic policy before turning to foreign affairs and must pile up legislative successes his first year. Bush rushed to Beijing a month after taking office and has made two overtures to China since the Tien An Men Square massacre. He’s taken two trips to Europe, one to Malta. He’s “the master of the small gesture,” insists Sununu. He brought President Francois Mitterrand of France to Kennebunkport, Me., for a weekend, dragged President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to a baseball game and “spent countless hours” on the phone with foreign leaders. Meanwhile, Bush’s attention to domestic policy has been spotty. Sununu argues that he laid a “foundation.” But for what? Bush doesn’t like most of the legislation bubbling up in Congress.

Reagan’s popularity was supposedly grounded in his skill as a TV performer. This led to the assumption that a President has to be good on television to be popular. Bush is lousy on TV. His best TV appearance was the night before Thanksgiving when he talked about the demise of communism. I’ll bet remote controls began clicking around the country after a few minutes. When Bush invites reporters and TV cameras into the Oval Office for a chat, there’s not much stagecraft. As he talked on Nov. 28 about the summit, then four days away, the cameras couldn’t get a shot from the front. He appeared on the evening news shows in profile.

Reagan minimized the time he spent with reporters. Bush can’t get enough. In his first 11 months, he held 14 informal and 31 formal press conferences, chatted with reporters six times in the Oval Office, and was interviewed 51 times by news organizations and four times by groups. What comes across is Bush’s comfort in dealing extemporaneously with the press. Reagan was uncomfortable, but he nonetheless managed to dominate the news. Bush doesn’t dominate. Days go by when the White House isn’t a major subject in the news. On ABC, CBS and NBC, Bush has gotten a third the coverage Reagan did his first year. The Bush White House could care less. “They don’t even try to get events in time for the TV news,” says an official.

Another rule Bush honors in the breach is that an ideological rudder, or at least a vision, is necessary. Reagan was an ideological architect. Bush is a bricklayer. He’s split the difference on practically every issue he’s confronted, except taxes and abortion.

Bush has taken several stabs at articulating a vision of how the world should look in the 1990s, but he hasn’t made much headway. On Thanksgiving eve, Bush tried the theme of walls. The Berlin Wall had been opened, but Bush cautioned “that some walls still remain between East and West. These are the invisible walls of suspicion, the walls of doubt, misunderstanding and miscalculation.”

The flip side to a President with an ideology is a White House chief of staff who’s an experienced, pragmatic pol. James A. Baker III was just that under Reagan and became the model for future chiefs of staff. Sununu doesn’t fit the model. He’s neither experienced in Washington nor a pragmatist. He, not Vice President Dan Quayle, is the conservative movement’s main man in the White House. More than anyone else, Sununu was responsible for persuading Bush to veto four bills that made abortions easier to obtain.

One final rule. Reagan made the rhetorical presidency the rage in Washington. How else could a President operate effectively, except by going over the head of Congress to the American people? Stirring the nation to action was supposed to be the President’s first priority. It’s not Bush’s. “This is as unrhetorical a presidency as you’ll get,” says a White House official.

Bush is better at appealing to a room of kids than whipping up public sentiment. On Halloween he talked to children at a White House party. Bush told them Halloween is “a time for ghosts and goblins, for haunted houses and scary stories. But right now I want to talkto you just briefly about a scary story that isn’t make-believe . . . I’m talking about illegal drugs and how they hurt people and how they hurt families, hurt kids, some of them just like you.” As Bush spoke, the kids hung on his words.