NEWS ANALYSIS : GOP Seeks to Link Gains in Foreign Policy to Economy

As Secretary of State James A. Baker III takes charge of President Bush’s re-election bid, GOP strategists are swiftly developing what they view as a compelling theme for the campaign’s heretofore ill-defined nature: How his first-term achievements in foreign policy set the stage for a future revival of the nation’s flagging economy.

In effect, Bush and his surrogates argue, ending the Cold War--with its massive drain on the nation’s resources--was a necessary first step toward action on pressing domestic problems.

Beyond explaining how Bush, in what his aides hope will be a second term, can address the host of domestic problems that now preoccupy voters, the argument also helps the incumbent answer charges by Democratic challenger Bill Clinton that he failed to do enough on domestic policy during his first term.

A key factor in getting this message across to the electorate was the shift to the White House of Baker, who because of his previous experience as Treasury secretary and President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff in a sense personally embodies the claimed synergism between international affairs and concerns at home.

And for the first prime-time airing of the message, the Bush campaign chose the Great Communicator, Reagan, who addressed the convention Monday night.

No one else, said Bush campaign manager Frederic V. Malek “is in a better position to put in context what has taken place in the world over the past 12 years and what America’s role has been in reshaping the world, and what this has meant not only to the world, but what it has meant to Americans here at home. How it has improved our prospects for the future in terms of the peace dividend, export opportunities and the like.”

Reagan sought to drive just that point home in his address to the convention.

“Within a few short years, we Americans have experienced the most sweeping changes of this century: the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the global economy,” Reagan told the delegates, and “the changes of the 1990s will leave America more dynamic and less in danger than at any time in my life.”

“Who among us would trade America’s future for that of any other country in the world?” he said.

Earlier in the day, Bush himself took up the new chorus in an address to an Indianapolis convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “We owe you more than a strong America abroad,” he said. “We owe you a strong America at home.”

And, he explained in a CNN television interview: “We really made dramatic changes in the world. Now I need your help, the people of America’s help, in bringing to America the kind of change that I think will move us briskly ahead during the rest of the ‘90s--and I’m talking about education, health care, crime, whatever it is.”

James Cicconi, issues director for the Bush campaign, said the interconnected message “absolutely” helped the GOP team to address foreign policy issues that might otherwise be perceived as irrelevant to a domestic-focused campaign.

“You’re either a leader or you’re not,” Cicconi said. “It’s not possible to separate out foreign and domestic and say you’re a leader in one area and not in the other.”

No one pretends that this approach is a sure-fire formula for victory. “Clinton could say if foreign policy things are settled now, and we turn to domestic policy, we Democrats are the ones who can do this better,” said Rice University political scientist Richard Stoll, a specialist in international relations.

Or alternatively, Democrats could point to continuing trouble spots in international relations, Yugoslavia and Iraq, and demand Bush explain how he proposes to deal with them.

“There are problems with the strategy,” says Stoll. “But given where things are and Bush’s strength and weaknesses, it may be the best shot he has.”

Bush gets an approval rating of 59% for foreign policy in a Times Poll of 1,146 voters released this week, compared to 42% overall and 25% for his handling of the economy. And by 61% to 21%, voters think Bush can better handle foreign affairs than Clinton.

The trouble is, right now voters are not interested in foreign policy. Asked to volunteer what issues they would like to hear discussed by the presidential candidates only 5% of those interviewed cited foreign policy, compared to 29% who mentioned the economy.

Among the gains the GOP would make if their new message linking foreign and domestic policy goes over:

* Converting foreign policy achievements from a liability to an asset. While the GOP likes to take credit for the collapse of communism, the passing of the Red menace so far has been a net political minus for Bush because it undermined the importance of the national security issue, on which Republicans have scored higher than Democrats.

Meanwhile, Bush’s acknowledged preference for steering the ship of state in international waters rather than dealing with messy domestic headaches has hurt his approval rating as problems at home have grown more urgent.

But now, the hope of GOP strategists is that he can demonstrate his efforts abroad have put him and the country in better shape for dealing with the nation’s economy and other domestic concerns.

* Focusing attention on the one issue area--foreign policy--which Republicans believe to be Clinton’s weakest spot. Republicans have been quick to point out that Clinton’s entire political career has been spent in the Arkansas state government.

“If there ever was a blank slate candidate in the most important function of the President, commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton wins that contest,” William F. Martin, former special assistant for national security affairs in the Reagan White House, said last month during the Democratic convention in New York.

Putting more attention on Bush’s foreign policy achievements, Republicans believe, will help them underline Clinton’s inexperience in this area. “People aren’t quite sure about Clinton,” says Rice University’s Stoll, and tend to worry that “maybe he doesn’t know enough about foreign policy.”

* Emphasizing Bush’s link to Reagan. As Reagan’s convention speech dramatized, the new Bush message helps to remind voters of the continuum between the two. And Reagan was never more compelling as a President than when he was challenging the “Evil Empire” of communism.

As Malek put it at a press breakfast here: “We think Ronald Reagan is someone who has started us in this direction we have been going in and who has witnessed George Bush’s accomplishments over the years and can best put into perspective the changes in the world and America’s impact on it.”

In addition, Reagan is also, along with Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the two most popular Republican presidents of the post-war era, and the winner of two landslide elections. Republicans hope that some of the Gipper’s political magic will rub off on his former vice president.

This is not the first time that Republicans have tried to exploit Bush’s success in foreign policy to help his standing in domestic affairs.

As early as February, Bush introduced as a centerpiece of his campaign the slogan: “We have changed the world, and now we’re going to change America.” But Ed Goeas and other Republican consultants said that message has had little resonance.

And even top Bush campaign staffers complained privately that the slogan seemed to imply that domestic affairs was an afterthought--”something you turned to when the hard stuff was done.”

Another problem was that the President failed to make clear the connection between foreign and domestic policy.

“We sort of said, ‘Containing communism means American jobs,’ ” one senior official said, “but we haven’t been any good at explaining the steps in between.”

“We have to get it through to people that these two things are related,” the official continued. “Our trouble is that people have been saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got foreign affairs solved, let’s let the next guy take a crack at the other stuff.”

The significance of Baker’s appointment to head the campaign, Bush aides said, was that he more than anyone else is capable of helping the President articulate such a complicated message.

He began that effort in his farewell speech as secretary of state last week in which he asserted: “The President knows that all policies have to be brought together effectively if we are going to prosper as a people and succeed as nation. . . . We must concentrate on the interrelationship between domestic and foreign policy, and between economic and security policy.”

“Baker understands (those) interrelationships . . . better than anyone else,” one of his associates said. “It is very difficult to talk about a global economy in terms that are important to people’s daily lives. What we need to say is that the end of communism means new markets that will be a sponge for American goods and that means jobs.”

And Craig Fuller, a longtime Bush loyalist who is serving as the reelection campaign’s convention chairman, said flatly: “One of the most important reasons that Jim Baker can be so helpful is using his skills to explain the connections between foreign policy and Bush’s domestic agenda.”

Goeas, the Republican pollster who works for the Houston-based Tarrance Group, said the campaign had done an inadequate job until now of delivering that message. But he said it could play a potent political role.

“I’ve always felt this was the message they should have,” Goeas said. “And I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it said as succinctly and completely as Baker did it.’