Creature of the Establishment, Bush Pursues Image as Agent of Change : Campaign: Speech illustrates how White House is pressing argument that President is best positioned to respond to unrest over status quo.

Remember George Bush, the 1988 candidate whose long government resume would make him ready for the presidency from Day One? The senator’s son who learned the ropes of Congress as a member of the House two decades earlier? The insider who led the CIA and the Republican National Committee, and who represented Washington at the United Nations and in Beijing?

Forget it all.

Meet George Bush, the 1992 agent of change.

Denouncing “members of the House and Senate (who) are now permanent Washingtonians,” Bush presented himself Friday as the force for reforming a federal government he has served for roughly 16 of the last 21 years, and as the leader who can put a whip to Congress.

Asserting, “Our Founding Fathers never considered elected government service to be a career,” he endorsed a 12-year term limit for senators and representatives. That would require a constitutional amendment, like the one passed in 1951 to hold the President to two terms.

Bush used the words “change” and “reform,” or their derivatives, 42 times in his speech to the Federalist Society of Philadelphia. He said the House “bank and post office scandals are the result of one-party control--one party’s lack of supervision, lack of new blood, and lack of change.”

More than any address he has given recently, the President’s speech hammered home the emerging theme of his reelection campaign--that after nearly a lifetime spent at the center of Establishment politics, George Bush is best positioned to direct the change both political parties sense that the voters are demanding.

“The choice is clear,” he said. “On one side stand the defenders of the status quo. On the other, the forces of change.”

With Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who has never held Washington office, gaining a wide lead in delegates in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bush is trying to move aggressively to preempt him from cornering this market.

Clinton, said White House Chief of Staff Samuel K. Skinner, “doesn’t have the experience to change the process. You’ve got to understand the process.”

By this argument, on which the White House is hanging much of its hope for campaign success, the very experience Bush cited as his strong suit four years ago after serving eight years in the vice presidency gives him the authority now to call for dramatic change.

“Who better to do it than the President?” Skinner said.

But Bush may have his work cut out for him.

One senior Republican consultant in frequent contact with the Administration said the President “can credibly make the argument that Ronald Reagan made in 1988--that we are the change.”

But, he said, Bush must then spell out specifically “the vision thing--what I am going to do in the second term . . . and I don’t mean to change subcommittees on (Capitol) Hill.”

The President’s speech was considered an official address, rather than a political event, so his travel was paid for out of government, rather than campaign, funds.

He called, as he has before, for term limits, campaign finance reform, and for the elimination of campaign-funding political action committees supported by corporations and trade associations.

But he opposes federal financing of congressional elections, a step intended to limit the impact of special interest groups’ campaign contributions. Legislation that would provide partial, voluntary public financing of congressional campaigns, similar to the financing available for presidential candidates, is likely to reach Bush soon, and he is expected to veto it.

With his own Republican Party generally holding a strong advantage in fund raising, Bush considers public congressional campaign financing “taxpayer-financed incumbent-protection,” deputy press secretary Judy Smith said. Bush himself has benefited since his 1980 presidential campaign from the availability of federal matching funds for presidential races.

By unleashing almost daily criticism of Congress--with which at other times he has vowed to work closely--Bush is placing himself in the mainstream of political opinion.

Andrew Kohut, director of surveys for the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press, has said polls dating to 1965 have not turned up levels of dissatisfaction with Congress as high as in current surveys.

Bush said he would send to Congress next week legislation that would make Congress subject to “the laws it imposes on others.”

“No more special treatment,” he said, as he called for making the House and Senate subject to anti-discrimination and conflict-of-interest laws, from which Congress has exempted itself.

On the day that House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) said to reporters in Washington that Bush was the “king of perks,” and Vice President Dan Quayle was the “crown prince of perks,” Bush referred to the perquisites of life on Capitol Hill and the White House, and said: “This is not about barber shops, perks, calligraphers or parking spaces.”

Rather, the President said, he was talking about “big things, major changes to make government more responsive. It is about the changes that are sweeping the rest of the country but are not being made in Washington.”

For his audience, Bush chose an organization of conservatives and libertarians that seeks to counter what it sees as an “orthodox liberal ideology” in law schools and the legal profession.

Most of the audience applauded when Bush called for term limits. But a Republican politician he brought with him, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, stood quietly. Specter is seeking a third six-year Senate term.

At the same time he was criticizing Congress, the President was asking for its cooperation in passing his aid package for the former Soviet Union.

In a letter to Congress formally transmitting his proposal, unveiled Wednesday, Bush said: “The success of democracy and open markets in these states is one of our highest foreign policy priorities. . . . While this is an election year, this is an issue that transcends any election. I urge all members of Congress to set aside partisan and parochial interests.”