COLUMN RIGHT : Bush’s Record Should Suit Conservatives : Buchanan’s vision has warped; the President is free to stand boldly on the right issues.

Brethren: It is time to get serious.

First, about Patrick J. Buchanan.

Pat Buchanan has been a stalwart leader in conservative politics for more than a generation. When others counseled caution during the Reagan years, Pat wisely urged us not to kowtow to the Beltway common wisdom, but to press vigorously ahead on our agenda. We did, and the world and the country are the better for it.

But something has happened to Pat in recent years, and it’s showing up more and more in his campaign. We have spent 20 years arguing for an inclusive conservatism; Pat is now practicing the politics of “them and us”--and the us seems to get defined ever more narrowly as the campaign unfolds. We successfully led America to victory in the Cold War; Pat is now sounding a rusty McGovernite trumpet and urging America to “come home.”

The politics of resentment, retreat, protectionism, isolationism and nativism are not the politics of the conservative mainstream. They are the politics of the fever swamps. And that is where they should stay.

Second: We have to get serious about George Bush.

Some of the President’s problems are, alas, of his own making, and it does little good to suggest otherwise. They began, I fear, on Inauguration Day in 1989, when the new President seemed to suggest that the bitter conflict between the second Reagan Administration and the Democratic Congress was really an issue of tone--something that a “kinder, gentler approach” could resolve. Well, that wasn’t the case then, and it isn’t the case now.

The problem wasn’t atmospherics. The problem was substance: There were, are and will be serious policy differences between the congressional Democratic leadership and its liberal agenda, and the administration of any conservative Republican President. Those differences have to be engaged and fought out. And this Administration has not entered the lists with sufficient relish.

The President has not held the line on taxes, and he has not persistently fought the expansion of the regulatory leviathan.

These are mistakes. They ought to be acknowledged and, if possible, reversed.

But conservatives are being needlessly lachrymose if they don’t also remember this President’s towering accomplishments.

George Bush successfully assembled and led a great international coalition against an aggressor who, unchecked, would have wreaked havoc in a vital region of the world; and in doing so, the President put an end to the Vietnam Syndrome.

George Bush has continued the Reagan reform of the federal judiciary. By appointing Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and by sticking with him in the face of a ruthless assault on Thomas’ integrity, the President not only put an articulate conservative on the nation’s highest bench; he also strengthened those millions of the African-Americans who are tired of living on the liberal plantation.

George Bush has been a firm opponent of abortion-on-demand and a strong defender of the unborn--issues on which the Democrats have once again shown themselves in thrall to extremists. In doing so, the President has strengthened the right-to-life movement as we prepare for the great debate that will follow the reversal of Roe vs. Wade.

Finally, and with respect for a fellow conservative, I say: It is time for George Bush to relentlessly articulate the themes of his candidacy, the themes that will shape a second Bush Administration.

The President should speak out, firmly and unambiguously, in favor of a color-blind opportunity-and-responsibility society in which men and women are judged on the content of their character, not on the fortuities of pigmentation and gender. This means a firm “no” to quotas and set-asides, and an enthusiastic “yes” to race- and gender-neutral programs like Head Start.

The President should frontally attack the nation’s most entrenched special interest, the public-education lobby, by demanding passage of parental-choice legislation and by making middle-class and poor children the first beneficiaries of choice. Competition works in the world of commerce and it will work in education.

The President should reject the sloganeering about “America First” and proclaim that the real issue is American leadership in consolidating the revolution of freedom around the world.

That is the President I think George Bush wants to be. That is the kind of President America needs. And that is the kind of President conservatives should enthusiastically support.