COLUMN RIGHT : Bush Must Now Face the Problem: Bush : The President’s difficulties stem from his own policies, not Sununu’s abrasive style.

When the owner of a baseball team fires the manager, the pennant is usually already lost. The thinly veiled dismissal of John Sununu as White House chief of staff likewise suggests continued trouble ahead for the Bush Administration. Bush is moving into difficult political weather, and the departure of Sununu will not make life easier for him.

Lyn Nofziger, a former assistant to President Ronald Reagan, told the Washington Times that “Sununu made an excellent scapegoat,” theoretically giving Bush the chance “to start all over again and prove it was indeed Sununu’s fault.” There’s not much chance of that happening, of course. The departure of the scapegoat does not auger well for the goat.

Almost everyone in Washington knows this. On the day after Sununu’s departure, the Washington newspapers reported a dozen analysts as saying that Bush’s difficulties would no doubt persist. They stem from the substance of his policies, not the style of his chief of staff. If Bush really does believe that Sununu’s abrasiveness hurt his own popularity, that is only one more piece of evidence that Bush is in the wrong line of business and is ever ready to take the advice of his enemies.

For weeks and months, there has been a great deal of anti-Sununu sentiment within the Beltway. Even when Bush was popular, Sununu was extremely unpopular. His dismissal is thus one more act of propitiation by the President--one more feckless attempt to buy off criticism, this time by ditching one of the few conservatives in his Administration. There is a good deal of truth to the point made last Sunday by House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.): Sununu “represents the conservative part of the President’s agenda,” Gingrich said. “And in this city, if you are the conservative spokesman, you’re going to get your brains beaten out.”

For all his famous abrasiveness, Sununu did keep in touch with the real world. It’s worth noting that the political Establishment in Washington forever encourages Republican Presidents, as a matter of prudence, to move to the political center. When this advice is ignored (rarely, in Bush’s case), the Beltway response is to accuse the errant President of acting “politically.” Thus the conventional pundits tacitly acknowledge the unpopularity of their “pragmatic” advice.

Sununu’s abrasiveness was much criticized, and justifiably. But there was more to this than merely tactlessness. It betokened a real willingness by Sununu to oppose the sages of the Beltway. He didn’t mind how unpopular he was inside Washington as long as Bush’s policies were popular outside it.

Sununu’s real problem was that his job by definition entailed carrying out the will of the President. It’s naive of conservatives to blame Sununu, as some have, for “supporting” the Bush tax-increase measure last year. Short of quitting on the spot, Sununu had no choice but to agree with it. Sununu will no doubt be replaced by an anodyne chief of staff who treats the press with care and feeding, smiles for the cameras and, for a while at least, will be rewarded with flattering notices. Bush may then feel that his problems are over.

Wrongly. His real problem is that he is himself so tone-deaf politically that he doesn’t see, to this day, that breaking his most conspicuous campaign promise, not to raise taxes, cost him dearly with the people. The Washington Establishment wanted a tax increase, and that was enough for George Bush. He seems think that giving the permanent government what it wants is equivalent to doing the right thing. The truth is that Bush is essentially an apolitical figure in the highest political post in the land. He likes foreign policy precisely because he construes it apolitically: a source of unity rather than division (“politics stops at the water’s edge.”)

Now he is in trouble politically because the economy is in trouble, and no one has yet been able to lay the blame for the economy on John Sununu. What the economy needs is a tax cut, but that is what the Washington Establishment does not want. On the issue of tax cuts, the Democrats now have Bush neatly cornered. But he walked into the corner in the first place, when he broke his “read my lips” pledge.

Washington conservatives are nonetheless fairly undismayed by Sununu’s departure. The reason is that they have already given up on Bush. The latest issue of William F. Buckley’s National Review washes its hands of him--the first time since 1974 that the magazine has repudiated an incumbent Republican President. And that was not an auspicious year for the GOP. With Sununu gone, more and more conservatives are likely to turn to Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative commentator, who will be in New Hampshire next Tuesday to announce his presidential candidacy. Buchanan may be the winner here.