BEYOND REPAIR? BUSH LOOKS TO THE CONVENTION FOR POLITICAL SALVATION : Not Since Hoover . . .

The Republican National Convention, meeting this week in Houston, is shaping up as the most skittish to endorse a sitting GOP President since the 1932 convention crossed its fingers and renominated another unpopular and failed economic policy-maker--Herbert C. Hoover. Even if George Bush, now at 30% approval in the polls, gets a short-term boost from a good speech on Thursday, the precedents are about as chilling as Texas’ August air conditioning.

The problem is that Bush comes to Houston about 20-25 points behind his Democratic rival Bill Clinton. Since no presidential candidate has ever overcome a late-summer deficit this big, it’s a race many Republicans worry cannot be won--despite James A. Baker III’s taking the reins of the campaign--unless Bush and Baker turn in performances of a lifetime.

For the other three Republican presidents elected since World War II--Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan--renominating conventions were triumphs en route to landslide reelections. Only Gerald R. Ford, an appointive President, suffered through a divisive convention and lost in November. It’s this history that’s crumbling around Bush’s feet.

Economics, obviously, has been the critical new ingredient. The GOP’s big winners got recessions out of the way early and enjoyed surging economies in time for reelection. Bush, by contrast, has produced his economic surges in bankruptcies, foreclosures, deficits and unemployment lines. Indeed, Clinton correctly charges Bush with presiding over the lowest economic growth rate of any President since--who else?--Hoover.

This Bush-Hoover parallel is no coincidence. Bush has fallen afoul of the same economic cycle--a debt-and-speculative boom that becomes a bust--that defeated Hoover and scuttled the GOP coalition in 1932. Bush, like Hoover, was a man who didn’t understand what was happening as he watched the economic downturn linger and spread. Bush’s economic recovery, like Hoover’s prosperity, is always just around the corner. Like Hoover, Bush blames everybody else--but voters blame Bush, now giving him less than 20% approval for managing the economy. Hoover probably commanded even less respect in 1932, but there were no polls.

Hoover had lost credibility, like Bush today. Huge numbers of Republicans disapproved of him and leading newspapers called on him to retire. Then as now, the dominant GOP coalition showed signs of collapsing. In recent polls, for example, about 40% of Republicans disapprove of how Bush has handled the economy, about 30% disapprove of Bush’s overall performance, 25%-30% are disappointed enough with Bush to vote for Bill Clinton. That’s not poll data; that’s disgust.

It is telling that 30%-40% of GOP members of Congress have decided to skip the Houston convention. Much more is involved than family squabbles, as Bush officials contend. If the convention cannot rise above Bushdom’s recent stale rhetoric and shrill fear-mongering, today’s GOP voter disaffection could turn into autumn’s disintegrating coalition. The last time an aging GOP governing coalition had so many members moving toward the exits was, of course, 1932.

This explains the Houston convention managers’ obvious preoccupation with old icons--not least, former President Reagan--and slotting speeches by the factional leaders of disaffected conservatives: Jack F. Kemp, Patrick J. Buchanan and religious right stalwart Pat Robertson. White House fears that the coalition is breaking up underlie the kowtowing to the right on platform issues. Most GOP presidential campaigns have been free to target Democrats; Bush has to work to keep one-third of his party from straying.

Yet he and his advisers fail to understand that stronger conservatism is not necessarily the remedy to keep a conservative coalition intact. It wasn’t in 1932, when moderate and progressive Republicans led the bolt to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats, and it isn’t now. Sure, prominent conservatives have taken the lead in dismissing Bush’s presidency, but the millions of angry Republicans preparing to vote for Clinton represent a more centrist viewpoint. They could harden against Bush if he courts the right with anti-abortion platform planks and further tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans. Democrats made a related mistake when the liberal coalition was breaking up in the late 1960s: They swung left to cement their appeal to dissident liberals--and wound up conceding a redefined center to a generation of Republican presidents.

Bush and the GOP, in turn, are in danger of losing part of their coalition in the form of erstwhile Ross Perot supporters realigning to Clinton. A generation ago, the Democrats’ majority presidential coalition shrank to minority status when supporters of Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace in 1968 became presidential Republicans four years later. Now, polls in such states as California, Colorado and Arizona suggest Perot’s short-lived campaign may have a similar effect: Republicans who first shifted to Perot are likely to move to Clinton. Most would be pro-choice on abortion and centrist on tax policy, so the GOP platform’s extremist tilt could reinforce their switch.

In addition to specific conservative issues, Bush and his strategists have decided to emphasize “family values” in Houston. The Bush strategy: First, to posit the Democrats as the foes of family values by attacking their permissiveness. and second, to argue that the decline of the family, not the decline of the economy, is the root of national problems.

A risk for the GOP, though, is that aspects of Republican economics mock “family values” almost as much as the 1970s counterculture liberalism did. Keeping down taxes on the rich while letting the total 1991 federal tax burden on the average family set a record of 28 cents on each dollar hardly exemplifies family values. Neither does nonchalance about soaring costs of health insurance.

More to the point, if there’s any shared set of “values” in the Bush family, it lies in recurrent attempts to trade on the family name--whether it’s son Neil Bush and the savings-and-loan practices for which he was fined $50,000; or brother Prescott Bush, who became a consultant to a Japanese investment firm later identified as a mob front. No other First Family has had so many sons and brothers on the make.

However, the larger threat to Bush’s ability to portray himself as exemplifying “family values” is the escalating press attention to the longstanding rumor that Bush, too, has a “Jennifer.” Last week, the New York Post lit a fire under a reluctant press Establishment by running a front-page story on America’s “First Mistress”--the woman with whom then-Vice President Bush allegedly shared a Swiss villa during 1984 arms-control negotiations. Democrats have been chortling over this prospect for months, and it creates a stand-off in the 1992 “Bimbo Wars.” Bush’s “family values” campaign could wind up rivaling Quayle as a joke-line on late-night talk shows.

Yet the Republicans do have a tried-and-true theme: Change is risky. Even when voters want change, there is always a risk, a reluctance, in turning to a party long out of power, and to candidates who may not have the experience to deal with international crises.

By some important precedents, in fact, Clinton shouldn’t win. This is the first time he’s run for President, and with the exception of Jimmy Carter in 1976, no person elected President in the last half-century has won on his first try. In addition, Clinton hails from a small state, and that’s another historical no-no. People from minor states usually don’t have the experience or stature to win.

Thus, while the Republicans meeting in Houston this week do have a raft of problems that no GOP convention or elected President has dealt with in 60 years, that’s not the whole story. There are precedents that favor the GOP. If the convention succeeds, it’s less likely to come from restoring the laurels of the incumbent President than from fanning natural fears of change, not least among the huge numbers of Republicans now leaning to Clinton.

Focusing these doubts is a great challenge. Counterattacking incumbents in such predicaments often seem strident or out of touch, and nominating conventions, after all, are better platforms for boosterism than cynicism.