NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush Is Faring Poorly--in Race Against Bush

As the 1992 political campaign moves toward Super Tuesday and the crucial primaries just beyond, the Republican contest has taken on a clear shape: President Bush is running against himself--and faring poorly.

In the eyes of many Republican and independent political analysts, Bush’s problem is not that challenger Patrick J. Buchanan has ignited a substantial conservative revolt. Instead, exit polls and other evidence suggest, a large share of Buchanan’s votes have come from ordinary people who say they do not much like the challenger but want to show their anger at Bush--especially over his handling of the economy.

Reflecting this pattern, Bush has been losing about one-third of the vote in recent primaries, whether Buchanan campaigns hard or hardly at all.

Yet the President’s response to the Buchanan assault has been to focus heavily on placating conservative activists, not looking for ways to strengthen his image as a leader on the economy. The result, political analysts say, has been a further weakening of the President’s once-bright prospects for the fall general election.

Polls and interviews with voters show Bush faces two large and interrelated problems: the economy is bad, and a high percentage of voters see in him a President with no clear views on how to make it better.

One expression of that view came from Clarence McEcchern, an optometrist in Columbia, S.C., who was part of the roughly quarter of the voters who backed Buchanan in that state’s primary Saturday. “I really and truly don’t like the way Bush has fought the battle in Washington. He’s not stuck to his conviction,” McEcchern said.

Instead of addressing those two problems directly, Bush has concentrated on the perceived threat of Buchanan-the-ardent-conservative. And he has done so in a way that makes him seem to be “flailing around,” said John Petrocik, a political scientist at UCLA and sometime political consultant. As a result, “he winds up looking like he’s not a leader.”

Indeed, analysts say, Bush’s policy reversals, apologies and hedges of his previous positions over the last few weeks have managed to resurrect the one negative image Bush and his advisers believed the war in the Persian Gulf had buried forever: the “wimp factor.”

Over the last two weeks, Bush has forced John E. Frohnmayer to resign as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, authorized Vice President Dan Quayle to denounce proposed new tax regulations disliked by Christian fundamentalist churches, walked away from plans to seek expanded aid for the republics of the former Soviet Union and--most dramatically--declared his 1990 budget deal with Congress, for which he abandoned his “no new taxes” pledge, to be a “mistake.”

As the policy reversals mounted, Bush began facing increasing criticism that he had ceded effective control over large parts of his Administration to his conservative foe.

The Administration’s moves “reinforced the sense that George Bush (flounders) on matters of principle,” said Kevin Phillips, a Republican strategist frequently critical of Bush. The image Bush portrays, said Phillips, is of a man “with the un-courage of his un-convictions.”

More than three years into his presidency, Bush still must “figure out what he stands for and articulate it,” says Republican consultant Jay Smith. Instead, over the last few weeks, Bush has “said a little bit of everything.”

Then, late this last week, the Administration sought to respond to that sort of criticism. During campaign speeches in the South, Bush declared that “anybody can demagogue, but the President must make decisions.”

“Life means nothing without fidelity to principles,” he said.

Bush’s chief of staff, Samuel K. Skinner, told a group of reporters that the Internal Revenue Service rule requiring churches to disclose the identities of large donors was “not dead” after all.

And to counter the image of a panicky President stumping frantically across the landscape, Bush decided to cut short a series of campaign stops and return to Washington on Saturday night.

But with all the to-and-fro, Bush so far continues to have difficulty performing one central function of a political candidate, as his former drug czar and onetime choice to head the Republican National Committee wrote in a widely circulated article last week. Bush still faces a “political challenge,” William J. Bennett wrote--to “find definition and a clear raison d’etre for a second term.”

Part of the problem has been that Bush never expected to have to run this sort of campaign. As recently as last October, White House aides confidently predicted that Bush, after facing no opposition in the primaries, would walk to reelection in November on the strength of his Gulf War victory and a recovering economy.

Few if any in the White House imagined that already in March, Bush would have to bring out retired Army Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of U.S. Gulf forces, to help him in a campaign that was focusing almost exclusively on domestic policy issues as a result of the still-stagnant economy.

Not only was a domestic policy campaign not anticipated, it plays to Bush’s weak side.

“If you had asked George Bush in 1988 why he wanted to be President, he would have said it was ‘because I could do a good job,’ ” Petrocik said. “He didn’t really want to do anything in particular.”

In 1988, Bush won without a clear domestic policy agenda because, with the economy in good shape, voters worried more about bad things Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis might do than about good things Bush might not. Now, with the economy doing badly, voters “want to know what you want to do,” Petrocik said.

Beyond all this, Republican analysts say, is the problem that Bush and his top advisers appear to be basing their tactics on a bad memory, not present-day reality.

In the minds of Bush and his close friends and advisers, many of whom served as officials in the Gerald R. Ford Administration, Buchanan’s campaign has revived fears of Ronald Reagan’s conservative challenge to Ford in 1976--which clearly weakened Ford and contributed to Jimmy Carter’s election. Because of that, Bush has responded to Buchanan by trying to keep conservatives happy.

But election returns and exit polls make clear how much the present situation differs from Reagan’s crusade.

Returns from the five primary contests that preceded South Carolina showed a striking consistency--no sign of an outpouring of energized anti-Bush conservative voters and clear signs that the President loses roughly one-third of the vote no matter what kind of campaign Buchanan mounts.

In Georgia, where Buchanan campaigned vigorously and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, Bush got 64% of the vote. In Colorado and Maryland, where Buchanan did not campaign actively, Bush received 67% and 70%, respectively. In South Dakota, where Buchanan was not even on the ballot, Bush received 69% with the rest of the vote going to “uncommitted”--the functional equivalent of “none of the above.”

Only in New Hampshire, where 10% of the vote went to fringe candidates and write-ins, did Bush do significantly worse, polling 53% of the vote to Buchanan’s 37%.

Although activist conservatives make up the small group at the head of the Buchanan campaign, they have not constituted the bulk of Buchanan voters.

A Los Angeles Times exit poll of voters in Georgia showed that self-described conservatives--about half the primary turnout--favored Bush over Buchanan, 59% to 41%, only a shade different from the overall split in the vote.

A previous Times poll in New Hampshire provided similar results, as did polls conducted by TV networks in Maryland and Colorado.

Instead, the roughly one-third of primary voters who have opposed Bush consist predominantly of middle-class and lower-middle-class people who feel the nation is on the wrong track and that the President has no deep convictions about how to get it back on course. Among the 65% of Georgia Republican voters who see the nation “off on the wrong track,” Bush actually lost to Buchanan, 51% to 49%.

Bush’s margin of victory came from the more optimistic--and generally better off--third of the electorate, who voted for the President, 90% to 10%.

In short, a senior Bush campaign officials said recently: “We’re in trouble, not because of (Buchanan), because of us.”