COLUMN RIGHT/ TOM BETHELL : If We Must Be Stabbed, Let It Be in the Front : Since Bush has caved in on taxes and quotas, we might as well elect a Democrat.

After his budget deal last year, President Bush seemed to believe that domestic policy would be plain sailing for the rest of his term. Having traded away his most important promise to the electorate--his pledge not to raise taxes--the Democrats would surely admire his conciliatory nature. This would free him up to travel the world negotiating peace agreements, doling out foreign aid and listening to brass bands play “Hail to the Chief.”

Then his good friend and attorney general, Dick Thornburgh, was defeated in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Bush’s immediate reaction was to cancel a 10-day trip to Asia and Australia. This showed just how extraneous and dispensable such foreign outings really are, unintentionally validating the widespread criticism of the President’s preference for foreign affairs.

Bush also responded to the election results with one more denunciation of David Duke, who is running for governor of Louisiana as a Republican. Most of us know that Bush disapproves of Duke, but it is beginning to look as if the former Klansman strikes terror in his heart. Bush said that if he lived in Louisiana he would vote for the Democrat. Since it would have been easy for Bush to distance himself from Duke without embracing his opponent (he could have sympathized with Louisiana voters in their choice between two such candidates), this was inept.

Bush does not recognize that Duke, however unsavory his past, is making headway with valid issues that are unwisely ignored in Washington. The most important of these are taxes and what are called “civil rights,” now construed as the imposition of civil disabilities, primarily on white males. Having held the Democrats at bay for the past year by asserting that pending civil-rights legislation would require quotas, Bush has now thrown in the towel on this issue, too. The upset victory by Republican Kirk Fordice in the Mississippi governor’s race showed the potency of these issues. A political novice, Fordice campaigned on some of the issues that Duke exploits--welfare and civil rights.

In the Pennsylvania race, attention has focused on support of national health-care legislation by the winner, Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford. Here again the White House seemed to draw the wrong lesson. Bush said he would try to do more to help “people that are hurting.” One more “Republican alternative” is no doubt in the offing--an alternative that will embrace Democratic principles but quibble over dollars. This strategy, adopted several times in the past by Bush, makes Republicans look mean and unprincipled.

The Pennsylvania result should be construed more as a rejection of insider politics and established ways of doing business than as hunger for an expansion of the welfare state. Spending is already soaring out of control, with a record deficit of $268 billion this year. This is consistent with other election results, notably the wholesale ouster of New Jersey’s Democratic majority in the Legislature, which last year enacted a massive tax increase.

The most important change needed now is a cut in the capital-gains tax. A recent study by the London Stock Exchange showed that the American rate is now about the highest in the developed world. But Bush can easily be scared away from any such initiative by the familiar mantra of envy: He only wants to “help the rich.”

After last week’s elections, conservatives have been marveling at Bush’s political ineptitude. It’s as if he only takes advice from his enemies on domestic issues. How can a man who has spent most of his adult life in politics fail to see the real fault lines that divide the electorate? Now, for the first time, it begins to look as if his failure to understand these divisions really could jeopardize his reelection chances.

But there is something else that I have detected in conversations with conservatives in recent days, something I never heard regarding Ronald Reagan, or in the 1988 presidential race: indifference to Bush’s fate. The feeling is that he and his inner circle have been hanging around Washington for too long. That includes budget chief Richard Darman, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady and several others, including (as the voters in Pennsylvania seemed to feel as well) Thornburgh. We have seen enough of them. Let the voters impose a term-limit on them.

Would this result in a Democrat winning the White House? The answer is that a Mario Cuomo would hardly do things differently. The Cold War is over, so we don’t have to worry about defense policy. Markets impose severe constraints on “redistributionists” anyway. And if we are to have our taxes raised, or quotas imposed, let it be done by someone who makes no bones about it. Let us be stabbed in the front rather than the back.