To Get a Handle on Bush, Look Back a Few Years : Presidency: The tenant of the Oval Office as the century winds down bears an uncanny political resemblance to the one who presided at its birth.

Journalists have a tough time with George Bush. He’s accessible enough, holds lots of press conferences, and can even call reporters by name without a seating chart. Getting to him is no problem; getting a handle on him is something else.

As he looks forward to celebrating his first year in office, Bush can enjoy the ironic pleasures of having violated more political axioms than any recent President. He was the guy who could forget about winning the presidency because no sitting vice president had done that since Martin Van Buren. He was the pol whose slimy campaign tactics against the Democrats in 1988 had so polluted the soil in Washington that he would have a difficult time governing.

He was the President without an agenda, and the experts at the Brookings Institution say you can’t leave home without one. Yet, aside from a passionate pitch to reduce the capital gains tax on behalf of the country club set, Bush’s political menu bears about as much relationship to Johnson’s Great Society or Roosevelt’s New Deal as the bill of fare at Mom’s Diner does to the one at Lutece.

Strike while the iron is hot! That’s another piece of received wisdom that political scientists love. The argument is that you’ve got to go for the kill with Congress early (the way Ronald Reagan did with his tax and budget cuts in 1981) because your ability to awe the lawmakers wears off by the end of the first year. Bush never did awe the members of Congress; they don’t even fear him. Fear, we have been told, is a quality that Presidents must inspire in the breasts of senators and representatives. But that’s true only if you want them to do something. So here we have all these journalists facing deadlines and thinking of something original to say about a President who sits astride some of this decade’s highest approval ratings without having crammed the congressional hoppers and the airwaves full of stirring plans for new societies, new federalisms or new frontiers.

What kind of handle can you get on--or give to--this President? This is not Ronnie Reagan, the dreamy but amiable dogmatist who learned to love the Evil Empire. This is not the earnest, goody two-shoes Jimmy Carter, or the wily and treacherous Dick Nixon. George Bush can claim kindred patrician credentials, but he lacks the plummy hauteur of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And, unlike Jack Kennedy, he thinks of the White House as home, not some showcase for the arty party crowd. He’s no dour technocrat like Herbert Hoover, and next to the flinty and taciturn Calvin Coolidge, he would come across like one of the Care Bears. He’s not a malleable simpleton like Warren Harding or a starchy intellectual like Woodrow Wilson. What he is is a William McKinley.

It is not so much in personal characteristics as in political qualities and the times in which they held power that the 25th and 41st Presidents resemble each other. Both men were pragmatic figures in a political party that had come under the influence of ideologues, yet both felt the need to propitiate the social conservatives in the party--McKinley the prohibitionists and Bush the religious right. Both men won election in bitter campaigns in which high-profile campaign managers--McKinley’s Mark Hanna and Bush’s Lee Atwater--played prominent and controversial roles. One might even touch on the fact that both had served as junior officers in the greatest conflicts their centuries had known and had served in the House of Representatives, but it was the domestic and international political environments of the two Presidents that invite such intriguing comparison.

Bush, like McKinley, benefits enormously from the domestic prosperity enjoyed by the country. McKinley’s slogan was “The Full Dinner Pail”; Bush’s might well be “The Well-Stocked Freezer.” Ghastly conditions in the tenements of 1900 or the ghettos and barrios of 1990 were acknowledged by most Americans but seemed of greatest concern to small but intense groups of reformers--”muckrakers” they were called in McKinley’s day.

In McKinley’s era, as in Bush’s, it was a time for flexing military muscles in Latin America. McKinley’s contemporaries referred to the conflict with Spain as “a splendid little war,” a term that would not feel out of place in the lexicon of the Bush public-relations team for Panama. If there had been a Gallup Poll in 1898, McKinley would surely have been cruising along at more than 70% approval, that airy realm where Bush’s percentages dwell. Both Presidents faced the incipient breakup of great empires. Russia was a ramshackle monarchy headed for calamity in 1900, and Gorbachev’s Soviet Union faces an even more problematic future.

Where the two eras differ most, perhaps, is in the public mood. In 1900, there was an almost theological conviction among Americans that the 20th Century would belong to them; as the century ends, that self-assurance has given way to public doubt and uneasiness about America’s place in the future.

From Margaret Leech’s definitive treatment of that earlier era comes a description of McKinley that could easily be applied to Bush: “He sometimes obscured his views by a fog of phraseology, conventional or oracular. People, convinced that he agreed with them, were at a loss to remember what he said. Even his intimates frequently had to guess what he was thinking. . . . Many people called him pliant and amiable. Close associates were surprised to learn that he always contrived to have his way. A few saw stubborn, secret strength.”

What strikes the strongest note of affinity between these two Presidents is that they were the receptors and molders of events rather than great initiators. By their reactions, however, they have both improved the odds for their party’s longevity.