Reformers’ Influence Over GOP Is Growing : Change: Bush’s promises of a different approach to governing are part of the conservatives’ ‘new paradigm.’

George Bush: radical reformer.

It’s a little like imagining Madonna singing Verdi: A 68-year-old President who has spent most of the past quarter century in Washington gently maneuvering at the margins of modest change, now leading a crusade to reform the basic institutions of government and society--education, health care, welfare, the legal system.

But it is a theme that is rising in Bush’s speeches--and is likely to be a significant element in his address tonight and his subsequent efforts to draw a sharp line between himself and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

After a first term marked by caution and, critics say, disengagement on domestic affairs, Bush now promises that he will shake up the status quo more than Clinton--who he says is tied to outdated liberal approaches on issues like education. Earlier this week Bush declared: “My opponent wants to change our schools, oh, just a little bit, and I have a plan to revolutionize our schools.”

This growing emphasis on reform symbolizes the steadily widening influence of a band of GOP thinkers and elected officials who are seeking a new Republican approach to governing--alternately described as “the new paradigm” and the “conservative reform agenda.”

This group is still small in numbers--it includes Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld, U.S. Reps. Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Vin Weber of Minnesota and thinkers such as James P. Pinkerton, counselor to the Bush reelection campaign; Bill Kristol, chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle; and Stuart Butler, director of domestic policy studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

These activists have strong ties to the network of economists and writers who popularized the supply-side tax cuts 15 years ago; indeed, the new conservative reformers are among those who have been most aggressively urging Bush to propose major new tax reductions tonight--advice he appears to have rejected.

But while the supply-siders focused solely on tax policy, these conservatives are urging the GOP to confront an array of entrenched social problems--from poverty to health care to education--with new means such as vouchers to enable increased choice among schools and privatization of some government activities.

Through much of his first term, Bush displayed relatively little interest in this agenda; Budget Director Richard G. Darman ridiculed Pinkerton’s ornate “new paradigm” label by asking in a speech: “Brother, can you paradigm?”

And Kemp, the Administration’s most ardent advocate for these ideas, has wielded little influence--and spent much of Wednesday fending off reports that he would be dumped from the Cabinet in a second Bush term.

In the past two years, the Administration has introduced education, health care and legal reforms based on these ideas--but devoted little effort to pushing them through the Democratic Congress.

Now, however, the need to shake his image of complacency--and the desire to wrest the mantle of change from Clinton--is pushing Bush to embrace the reform agenda, at least rhetorically.

“You can’t defend the status quo, so you have to have a ‘change agenda’ of our own,” says one ranking Republican. “You look around the Republican Party and this is the only reform agenda out there.”

The rhetoric surrounding this new conservative agenda can get dizzyingly obscure: The other night, Gingrich tried to explain it by talking about the concept of “profound knowledge and the quality revolution.”

But this approach is grounded on an insight that also is motivating a parallel reform movement influencing Clinton and other Democrats: In the information age, centralized bureaucracies increasingly don’t work. As Pinkerton puts it: “The 1980s were a terrible decade for centralized bureaucracies and the people who depend on them--whether in the Soviet Union, New York City or General Motors.”

Therefore, the conservative reformers argue, the key to social and economic policy is responding to problems without enlarging government bureaucracy. The goal is to use market mechanisms--such as giving citizens greater choice in the way they use public services--to force government bureaucracies to display the flexibility and innovation of the best private sector companies.

As Gingrich put it in his speech to the convention Tuesday: “We Republicans see the efficiency of Wal-Mart and UPS and we want to change government to be as courteous, efficient, speedy and effective as those companies.”

This approach diverges from older Republican thought that tended to suggest domestic problems such as inner-city poverty were best avoided entirely; it differs from the traditional Democratic view that the best way to tackle problems is with new programs from Washington.

Although Congress has approved relatively little legislation embodying these new approaches, ideas reflecting these views are increasingly moving into the debate on Capitol Hill and in some statehouses around the country. Some examples:

--Instead of offering government grants to help states expand the availability of child care, Bush pushed for and signed legislation that gave families tax breaks to help them pay for such services.

--A handful of governors, led by Weld, are seeking greater efficiencies by privatizing public services, such as the cleaning of state highways. “I really think this is the wave of the future,” Weld said this week.

--Kemp has pushed legislation to attack inner-city poverty by offering tax breaks to induce companies to create jobs in depressed neighborhoods, and by giving residents of public housing a greater stake in their community by allowing them to buy their apartments.

--Instead of establishing a new government-run health care plan to provide universal coverage--as Clinton has proposed--Bush urges Congress to provide tax credits to help the uninsured buy coverage. Legislation backed by House Republicans would move further toward a market system, encouraging companies to limit their insurance coverage and instead provide their employees with tax-free “Medisave” accounts to cover health care costs; the goal would be to impose market discipline on the medical system by making consumers more sensitive to its costs.

--Under his private school “choice” initiative, Bush is urging Congress to provide families with vouchers that they could use to help send their children to private schools.

Many of these ideas are also attractive to Democratic reformers--some of them advisers to Clinton. In fact, Clinton himself has embraced ideas such as tenant management and ownership of public housing.

“To me the parallels are strongest to the progressive era when you had a transcendent reform wave that both parties had to accommodate themselves to,” says Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the leading Democratic outpost of the new thinking.

But there are still significant differences in the way Clinton and Kemp, for instance, apply this shared critique. Clinton and his advisers see these insights as the basis for renewing and streamlining government action; Republicans tend to see them as an alternative to direct government action.

The divergence may be symbolized most clearly on the issue of school choice.

The conservative reformers make this case: America has dramatically increased spending on schools over the past decade without increased result. The reason is that, as a bureaucratic monopoly, schools have no real incentive to change. The only way to force them to improve is to provide government aid that would give more parents the option of sending their children to private schools if they don’t like the education they are receiving in public schools.

While supporting such choice options within the public schools, Clinton--like almost all Democrats--opposes private school choice. Republicans say that’s because he can’t afford to antagonize teachers and other constituencies dependent on the status quo. Democrats say that choice alone won’t improve schools without more resources; and they maintain that allowing more parents to opt for private schools would create a two-tier system that would isolate the poor and minorities.

Bush has stressed the choice issue in virtually all of his recent appearances, using it as the foundation in a larger argument: that Clinton’s agenda means a dramatic expansion of government’s reach while he would solve problems without increasing bureaucracy.

“When the other side says government knows better,” Bush declared in a speech Wednesday, “I say parents know better.”

Even Democrats acknowledge that that could be a compelling case--if Bush is credible delivering it. And Republicans acknowledge that that’s a big if. A few weeks ago, for example, Bush misstated a central aspect of his choice proposal at an appearance in Philadelphia.

Privately, some of the conservative reformers acknowledge that Bush is at best a transitional figure who lacks an intuitive appreciation for these ideas--and might inexorably drift back to foreign policy concerns in a second term. But, whether Bush stays engaged or not, they believe that their approach has laid down roots that will spread through the party--among younger officeholders and in possible 1996 presidential campaigns by Kemp, Weld and Alexander.