Bush’s Dilemma Beyond Even Atwater’s Sure Touch : Politics: The former GOP chairman had perfect political pitch, but the President’s problems are about policy, not politics.

Wistful Republicans are beginning to whisper that things would be different for George Bush if former Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater were still alive, displaying a nostalgia for the good old days when the GOP had Democrats on the run and the President looked invincible. They miss the hardball political player with the penchant for rhythm-and-blues--and with good reason.

Atwater understood what it takes to win a campaign better than most other strategists on the scene, Democrat or Republican. That’s because political strategists like Atwater or James Carville (who masterminded Sen. Harris Wofford’s upset win over Dick Thornburgh), with an ability to understand and motivate voters, are a rare breed. No command of the technical details of running a campaign can equal an intuitive feel for the voters’ psyche.

Lee’s greatest contribution to the Republican Party was the Southern strategy. Beginning with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, Atwater saw that it was possible to attract traditionally Democratic voters in the South to Republican candidates. Atwater forged a coalition of Southern Baptists, fundamentalists and blue-collar voters that had been the bedrock of the Democrats’ Southern strength.

He took some unfair hits in the process. Critics now accuse the GOP of playing racial politics to win white votes in the South. But it was Patricia Roberts Harris, Jimmy Carter’s health and human services secretary, who, in 1980, played the racial card by saying that every time she heard Reagan speak she saw the specter of the KKK. The Democrats never complained about white Southern voters until they lost them to the GOP--and now they say it’s because those voters are susceptible to racial appeals.

Atwater was also behind the GOP’s drive to attract younger voters. He figured out baby-boomers were socially libertarian but fiscally conservative. His insight resulted in a strategy that still gives Republicans a looming generational advantage with younger voters.

Atwater had ferocious energy levels, which he committed to making the GOP a majority party. Having conquered the South, the baby-boomers and the young, he turned his attention to wooing black and minority voters. He envisioned the GOP as a “big tent,” large enough to accommodate many views on such controversial issues as abortion--issues that potentially pit components of the new GOP coalition, such as fundamentalists and baby-boomers, against each other. He built a political empire comparable to Alexander the Great’s and, like Alexander, burnt out young. For he died from a brain tumor at age 40.

But although Atwater was one of the most talented political operatives the GOP ever had, I doubt Bush’s reelection prospects would be vastly better today had Atwater been spared an untimely death.

That’s because the White House’s problems are driven by policy, not politics. As a political pro, Atwater knew his strengths and weaknesses as well as he knew those of his opponents. In the 1984 presidential campaign, he would often remind me, whenever I was tempted to meddle in White House policy-making, that the campaign’s job was politics, not policy. Atwater knew campaign managers who tried to supplant the judgment of the White House and Cabinet on policy matters usually didn’t last in the top job until Election Day.

In 1990, when the White House engineered a budget and tax deal with the Democratic Congress that has given Patrick J. Buchanan his opening on Bush’s right flank, Atwater was critically ill. Many in Washington argued that, if Atwater was well and functioning, the budget debacle would never have happened. This is unrealistic. The policy-making trio of John H. Sununu, Office of Management and Budget Director Richard G. Darman and Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady--architects of the deficit-reduction deal--didn’t allow domestic politics or the impact on the 1990 mid-term elections to enter the discussion.

This trio believed the 1990 deal would result in a short recession followed by robust growth. Conservative ire over a tax increase would be comfortably tucked in the recesses of memory by 1992. But their reckoning didn’t include collapsing economic dominoes--the Gulf crisis oil price hikes, tight credit in response to the subsequent inflation surge, a sickening thud as the real-estate market crashed, followed by a capital-consuming bank crisis as real-estate portfolios soured and plummeting consumer confidence.

For Bush, whose strong point in the polls has always been foreign policy, an election that increasingly looks as if it will focus on pocketbook concerns is an election that takes more than deft political skills.

Still, Atwater might have softened Bush’s drop in the polls. He would have understood better than most of the President’s advisers the urgent need to have Bush rapidly identify with the concerns of average working people. Atwater would have designed events and speeches to mirror that concern, while prodding the policy-makers to offer an economic recovery program earlier than the State of the Union Address in late January.

But Atwater could not have prevented Buchanan’s challenge. Buchanan is driven by the precedent of Reagan’s 1976 challenge to Gerald R. Ford, which set Reagan up for his successful 1980 presidential bid. Reagan nearly beat Ford in New Hampshire, and in so doing, became the leader of the GOP’s conservative wing. Buchanan’s announcement speech, as well as his autobiography, make clear that his goal is to be the undisputed leader of the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the Republican Party in 1996.

Ironically, Buchanan’s “America First” populist themes are just the sort that Atwater would have crafted. They play to the fears of average working people: That the new world order, with America as the last superpower, leaves little room for high-paying jobs--but we’ll still foot the bill for global security. Buchanan is taking aim at the Administration’s seeming flip-flops on taxes and quotas--issues Atwater would have repackaged so they couldn’t become vulnerabilities.

Buchanan doesn’t have to beat Bush to win. All he must do is place well in New Hampshire, while showing enough presidential mettle to build a following of party activists for 1996. The more significant danger comes from David Duke, running as an independent in the fall. Polls in New York show that if Duke is on the ballot, he’ll draw votes away from Bush, much as John Anderson did to Carter in 1980.

Were Atwater alive today he’d still be running the campaign of an incumbent President with primary challenges from the right and the fringe. But he would be moving aggressively to neutralize those challengers fast, and move on to the main contest with the Democrats. The difference between Atwater and his successors is that they are still organizing.