Bush Increasingly Veering Off Course Set by Reagan : Politics: President’s shift to the center seems to play well with voters, but the trend worries conservatives.

George Bush’s road to the White House in 1988 was paved by the spectacular political success of Ronald Reagan. Not only did Reagan win two presidential elections in landslide style, but his conservative thrust transformed the debate over public policy.

Yet no sooner did Bush take over the Oval Office than he began making adjustments in the steady rightward course Reagan had steered. Mostly symbolic at first, Bush’s changes have become more substantive as he moves into the second half of his term--and closer to the 1992 election.

On issues from energy and education to day care and defense, where Reagan was dogmatically conservative, Bush has moved toward more moderate positions, striving to blunt the attacks of liberal critics and--more important--to meet the needs and demands of the electorate.

Responding to criticism that the nation was overly dependent on foreign oil, Bush offered a plan to boost domestic production by 3.8 million barrels a day over the next 20 years. On the environment, he broke a legislative logjam that had dragged through the entire Reagan presidency and signed on to a historic revision of the Clean Air Act. He proposed a day-care program that would help provide more than $20 billion in aid to lower- and middle-income families. His education program, outlined last month, proposes a combination of national testing and standards and model schools to promote “a new renaissance in American education.”

And on defense, where Reagan stubbornly sought to keep his massive buildup alive, Bush has bowed to economic realities--and the sudden ending of the Cold War--and is actively working to design a scaled-down but still effective military.

It is too soon to tell whether Bush’s tactics will result in an advance or retreat for his party from the political gains Reagan made. Indeed, some analysts contend that despite his Operation Desert Storm triumph, the severest tests of Bush’s political leadership still lie ahead.

But what is beyond dispute is how well Bush has managed up to now to match his performance to the mood of the country during the transition to the post-Reagan era.

“More reactive than proactive in terms of a policy agenda,” wrote University of Pittsburgh presidential scholar Bert Rockman, “Bush came into office perfectly congruent with the historical and political moment.”

This President’s limitations are self-evident: an uninspiring style and a patched-together domestic agenda. “The Bush Presidency: First Appraisals,” a forthcoming collection of scholarly assessments co-edited by Rockman, judges the 41st chief executive to be “a pastel political personality serving in a mostly pastel time.”

Bush has also had to contend against a House and Senate both firmly controlled by the opposition party--resulting, by Congressional Quarterly’s annual tally, in a presidential achievement rate on Capitol Hill below 50%. That is the second lowest score for any President in nearly four decades.

And this is not to mention the towering federal budget deficit. The deficit portion of the Reagan legacy produced a near-permanent gridlock of government last fall, forcing Bush--to his intense embarrassment--to revoke his oft-uttered vow to resist any and all tax increases.

But for all of that, after 28 months in office Bush has turned out to be not only arguably kinder and gentler than his charismatic predecessor but also measureably more popular.

“Not only are his approval ratings higher than Reagan’s, but his negatives have been consistently lower,” noted Karlyn Keene, public opinion specialist and editor of the American Enterprise magazine.

“Reagan had an army of true believers willing to walk over hot coals because he appealed to a strong ideological theme,” said Richard B. Wirthlin, Reagan’s former pollster-in-chief. “Bush doesn’t have an army of true believers. But he does have a pretty deep and broad rank of supporters.”

“My constituents think he is the first normal President since Dwight Eisenhower,” said longtime Bush ally and former U.S. Rep. Bill Frenzel, a Minnesota Republican. “He is the guy who is like other people they know.”

Furthermore, by fulfilling a sweep of responsibilities from Texas congressman and national party chairman to United Nations ambassador, envoy to China and director of Central Intelligence, he gained a first-hand familiarity with the workings of government and the making of policy.

“Bush is not a rhetorical President,” said William J. Bennett, who served Reagan as education secretary and Bush as drug czar. “Yet he’s doing very well because he is used to responding to situations with a kind of professionalism.”

But the changes Bush has wrought in Reaganism reflect more than the differences in the two presidents’ styles and experience. Another major factor has been the changes in the political climate between 1980, when Reagan won the first of his two terms, and 1988, when Bush won the right to succeed him.

Until Reagan’s election, recalls Wirthlin, American politics had been dominated by the activist agenda established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he led the nation out of the Great Depression. “But then people’s view of government and its effectiveness changed because of inflation, unemployment, gas lines--all those things that hit us in the ‘70s,” Wirthlin said.

“The ground shifted toward the kind of goals Reagan had had since 1964, and when he took over he introduced and implemented a new political agenda,” Wirthlin said.

The Reagan agenda went over fine--as far as it went. He cut taxes, got the economy back on track and slowed the growth of social programs while adding military muscle. Some Reagan-era changes have even made governing easier for Bush. The easing of Cold War tensions, which Reagan partisans attribute to his “peace through strength” policies, has granted Bush greater flexibility and prestige in foreign policy and allowed him to scale back the costly defense buildup.

But the legacy had its downside too. Reagan’s gift for seeing the great forests of economic prosperity and national security was offset by his myopia when it came to the trees of education, health insurance, the environment and the like.

Even as Reagan’s popularity soared, his party was losing ground in state and local elections and in Congress, losing to Democrats who promised to deliver voters the goods and services for which they clamored.

The issues of national defense and the economy are “tremendously important and so fascinating,” then-Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, now the education secretary, told fellow Southern Republicans back in 1986. “But when we get together that’s all we talk about, and the Democratic governors are running down the street proposing programs to improve the schools, clean up the garbage, fix the roads and make the children more healthy--and they get elected.”

Bearing out Alexander’s warning, in that 1986 campaign, the Democrats--aided by gains in so-called Reagan country in the South and West--recaptured control of the Senate, and the Reagan revolution went into a permanent stall.

Something had to be done. And in his 1988 speech accepting the presidential nomination, Bush conceded that what had gone before was not sufficient to meet the demands of the post-Reagan political era.

Bush called for a “kinder, gentler nation.” And, using words Reagan could scarcely be imagined to have uttered, the new GOP standard-bearer acknowledged that “things aren’t perfect in this country. There are people who haven’t tasted the fruits of the expansion. I’ve talked to farmers about the bills they can’t pay. And I’ve seen the urban children play amid the shattered glass and the shattered lives.”

It was a refrain that echoed in his campaign, during which, along with mudslinging and cheap shots, he pledged himself to elevate American schools from the shameful state to which they had sunk, to fully fund the Head Start program for needy preschool youngsters and to rid the air of stench and the water of poison.

For many Republicans, including Reagan’s own partisans, this shift had less to do with ideology than with practical politics.

“George Bush was elected . . . essentially to continue the Reagan agenda in a somewhat more tempered way,” wrote Rockman.

“I think people are becoming more and more interested in the quality of life for themselves and the next generation,” said Michael K. Deaver, longtime Reagan adviser. “That has to do with air and water. But it also has to do with issues like education and health. And those are areas that the Republican Party and George Bush in particular have got to come to terms with and articulate plainly.”

In his inaugural, Bush sounded as though he was primed to take on the challenge. “The American people want action,” he admonished the Democratic Congress. “They didn’t send us here to bicker.” Yet the initial actions he himself proposed seemed to satisfy neither left nor right.

In his first spring in the White House, Bush proposed to spend nearly $500 million to improve education standards. But liberals griped that the funding was insufficient to have significant impact.

For their part, conservatives worried that the new President was turning into a big spender, a suspicion bolstered by Bush’s later willingness to accept a tax increase and his reluctance to keep pressing for a capital gains tax cut or a reduction in the Social Security tax, a Democratic idea which conservatives would dearly love to steal.

It is this tempering of Reagan doctrine, particularly on fiscal policies, that has so angered Bush’s conservative critics.

“The real difference between Bush and Reagan,” groused David Keene, American Conservative Union chairman, “is that Bush doesn’t particularly care about the rate of spending and taxes the way Reagan did. Bush cares about foreign policy.”

And even in foreign affairs, where the Bush presidency has so far had the most impact, some conservatives are unwilling to give him full marks, complaining he has lost sight of fundamental principles that guided Reagan.

Burton Yale Pines, senior vice president of the Heritage Foundation, the influential right-wing think tank, praises Bush for promoting a free-trade treaty with Mexico as an extension of Reagan’s own emphasis on free trade. But Pines faults the President for failing to give sufficient support to dissidents in the Soviet Union and in the Baltic states.

“He has wrapped himself around (Soviet President Mikhail S.) Gorbachev and has ignored the Baltics,” Pines said. “It (the Gorbachev regime) is a sinking ship, and he is committing us to it.”

Bush and his advisers are trying to ease the concerns of conservatives such as Pines by arguing that their domestic initiatives borrow heavily not only from Reaganite dogma but also from the newly developed conservative docket of New Paradigms, a variety of ideas intended to substitute market principles and tax incentives for government funds and control.

Thus they point out that, in line with Reagan’s thinking, Bush’s energy plan places great weight on oil exploration rather than conservation; the Clean Air Act provides for the government to auction off emission permits to companies instead of fining or shutting them down to combat acid rain; the day-care program emphasizes tax credits instead of grants to working mothers and the new low-budget education plan would encourage parents to send their children to whatever school they want, private or public, backed by funds now reserved for public schools.

“This President’s agenda is very much in tune with mainstream America, as was Ronald Reagan’s agenda,” said White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu. “It is designed to restore power and opportunity back to cities and states and back to individuals and families.”

Yet this flurry of activity has failed to still criticism from scholars as well as politicians in both parties that this President’s accomplishments and goals have failed to fulfill the potential of his political popularity.

“In all, President Bush arguably had the least domestic policy achievements in his two years in office of any President since the 1920s,” University of Illinois political scientist Paul J. Quirk writes in the soon-to-be published “The Bush Presidency.”

And Democratic Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV of West Virginia attributed his newfound interest in the Democratic presidential nomination to what he calls Bush’s failure to develop initiatives on domestic policy. “It’s ‘no’ to everything,” Rockefeller said. “It frustrates me, and I resent it.”

Not any more than Bush resents such criticism. “I am sick and tired of people saying we don’t have a domestic agenda because they’ve got their eyes closed or because they don’t want to hear,” Bush recently complained to a group of Republican senators.

Bush’s fundamental limitation as a political leader, however, is not just the skimpiness of his agenda, which he has been beefing up. Rather, it is the lack of a compelling and coherent framework, which is required to make a presidential agenda larger than the sum of all its parts.

It was this larger sense of purpose that Ronald Reagan evoked when he spoke of “the city on the hill,” that Richard M. Nixon called up when he referred to “the lift of a driving dream,” and what Bush himself haltingly described as “the vision thing.”

Yet in accepting his party’s nomination for the nation’s highest office, Bush contended that the choice before the voters amounted to selecting “the man at the desk” in the Oval Office. “My friends,” he declared, “I am that man.”

After more than two years, Americans have a much better grasp of who that man is--as a father, husband, world leader and commander in chief. But the public’s perception of Bush as a political leader remains just as blurry as Bush’s own vision of the political future.

And until those pictures clear, Bush will have difficulty--popular as he may be--in matching the Reagan legacy or going beyond it to establish one of his own.