NEWS ANALYSIS : Shifting Signals Stir Skepticism on Bush Agenda

Anyone who tries to keep up with George Bush during a round of golf is confronted with a man constantly in motion. Anyone tracking the twists and turns of his political agenda is confronted with much the same phenomenon.

Bush first sought a Senate seat in 1964 as a backer of the godfather of modern conservativism, Barry Goldwater, rose in his party as a moderate, tacked back toward the right as Ronald Reagan’s vice president and once again sought the center in his 1988 race for the White House. Since assuming the presidency, he has governed in a way that has left voters and analysts across the ideological spectrum uncertain how to answer the most basic question: What does he really believe?

“The central philosophical principle is that George Bush wants to be President because he grew up wanting to be President,” says Daniel J. Mitchell, an economic analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “There’s absolutely no evidence he wants to be President for any other reason than that.”

Mitchell is harsher than most of the President’s critics--but only by degree. Even some senior Bush Administration officials acknowledge that his first term has been marked by puzzling periods of inaction and a series of shifting signals on central questions.

Bush promised not to raise taxes, then did. He broke a decade-long stalemate and signed a historic extension of the Clean Air Act, then allowed aides to delay and water down regulations implementing the law. He embraced a balanced-budget amendment, but never submitted a balanced budget to Congress. He acrimoniously vetoed a civil rights bill, then signed virtually identical legislation a year later.

Now, after three years of governing in the gray zones, Bush is aggressively trying to define the presidential race in stark black-and-white terms. He tells audiences that a “grand canyon” of philosophical differences separates him from his challenger, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

He presents himself as an impatient reformer--an agent of change who would revive the economy and attack the nation’s entrenched social problems through a far-reaching program of tax cuts, government restructuring and increased trade brought about by a U.S.-Canada-Mexico free trade pact.

And over the last two years, ambitious policy proposals have tumbled out of the White House--on education, health care, streamlining the legal system, welfare, banking reform, trade and reviving the economy through tax cuts for individuals and business. Many of these initiatives represent state-of-the-art conservative thinking--an attempt to update traditional Republican suspicion of centralized government by applying market forces to the reform of public programs.

Several basic ideas link this agenda.

In economic policy, Bush believes that some government investments--in basic research on new technologies, for example, or on preschool programs for disadvantaged youths--can help boost long-term productivity and prosperity. But--unlike Clinton, who would dramatically expand such investments--Bush insists the most important thing government can do for the economy is get out of the way by limiting regulation, cutting taxes and spending, and avoiding expansion of its authority into new areas, such as guaranteeing coverage for those without health insurance.

“Our economic success wasn’t hatched in some committee room on Capitol Hill or around a conference table in the White House,” Bush declared in a speech last spring. “America is the most prosperous nation in history because it also is the freest. And that same commitment to limited government . . . must shape the reforms that we must urgently need to undertake.”

In social policy, Bush constructs his agenda around two pillars: promoting family values and increasing “choice” and “empowerment.”

Family values is a new label for the traditional agenda of the social conservatives and religious fundamentalists who have become an increasingly important faction in the GOP: banning abortion, restoring school prayer and resisting any expansion of gay rights.

The focus on choice and empowerment reflects the priorities of a younger generation of conservatives, who want to confront social problems without directly increasing government’s reach.

Rather than creating a new federal program to increase the availability of child care, for example, Bush pushed for and signed legislation that gave lower- and middle-income families tax credits to buy such services directly. He’s approached health care the same way--urging Congress to help the uninsured buy insurance through tax breaks, rather than creating a new government system of universal coverage.

Most important, Bush has proposed giving parents greater “choice” in their children’s education by providing them with vouchers that would defray part of the cost of sending them to private school if they wished. If more parents could afford to send their children to private institutions, public schools would be forced to reform or face an exodus of students, Bush argues.

In foreign policy, Bush has described his priorities as constructing a “new world order” built on the principles of expanding democracy and opening markets to free trade through such initiatives as the recently completed North American Free Trade Agreement.

For different reasons, much of this agenda comes under fire from the left and the right.

On the right, the primary complaint is that Bush’s record contradicts his rhetoric. On the stump, he rails against bloated government--but during Bush’s first three years as President domestic spending increased an average of 8.7% annually. That’s the most rapid increase under any President since John F. Kennedy, according to an analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute.

Moreover, says Stephen Moore, the institute’s director of fiscal policy studies, Bush has never vetoed a bill on the grounds that it spent too much money.

On the left, two indictments are lodged against Bush’s proposals. Critics see some of his ideas--particularly his support for private school vouchers--as an attempt to undermine public institutions. Others say his ideas represent timid “tinkering.”

Where critics on the left and right converge is in their doubt about the depth of Bush’s personal commitment to any of these domestic reforms. It took the Administration more than two years to issue its education proposal, and three years to produce a health plan (key portions of which still have not been introduced as legislation). And there is virtually universal agreement in Washington that Bush has shown only desultory interest in steering any of these ideas through the Democratic Congress.

The skepticism about his commitment frames the challenge facing Bush: convincing voters that a man who has often seemed most passionately attached to the status quo has not only the vision but the will to bring change to a nation profoundly uneasy about its future.