Bush Will Announce Economic Agenda : Campaign: President plans to describe some ideas in a 5-minute TV ad. But officials stress that it is not a specific program.

Three weeks ago, President Bush stood before his party’s convention in Houston and announced the apparent centerpiece of his economic platform: an across-the-board income tax cut for every working American.

But the announcement was never followed with a specific, concrete proposal--for the Bush Administration was divided on how large a tax cut it should be, how to pay for it in a budget already suffering a yawning deficit and whether the voters would insist on hearing those details.

Today, in an attempt to seize the initiative on the central issue of the presidential campaign, Bush plans to give a major speech in Detroit setting out a comprehensive economic agenda for the second term he hopes to win.

Aides described the speech Wednesday as a landmark in the Bush campaign, with the aim of erasing the widespread public image of a President with no clear idea of what he wants to do in domestic affairs. The Republican campaign even bought five minutes of nationwide television time tonight on three networks to allow Bush to present his economic message directly to the public.

The speech, sources said, is intended to pull together disparate Administration proposals on taxes, jobs, education and health care into a single, integrated program--in short, the “vision” that critics have often charged George Bush with lacking.

But the same economic and political constraints that kept Bush from getting specific in Houston will continue to restrain him in Detroit, officials say.

Administration officials say that, in his speech, Bush will not commit himself to any major new program but will merely point to an across-the-board, 1-percentage-point cut in income tax rates as an example of how his proposals might work. In addition, he will offer examples of up to $130 billion in spending cuts already proposed by his Administration--but not approved by Congress--that might be used to pay for his tax cut plan.

While the tax and spending proposals may sound like the outlines of a specific economic program, Administration officials were already stressing in advance of the speech that they are not.

The 1-percentage-point cut that Bush will discuss today is simply “illustrative” of the direction Bush hopes to take the nation, one senior Administration official said.

“The speech will have very much a thematic approach and is designed to give the President a chance to talk about the problems facing the economy and to show how his existing proposals offer an integrated approach to dealing with them,” one senior White House official said. “But don’t look for a lot that is new.”

“There are a lot of ideas floating around inside the Administration” on tax policy, another senior White House official said. “The (1-percentage-point) tax cut is one of them, but nothing has been decided on.”

So once again, Bush will point rather vaguely toward the broad economic themes that he hopes to pursue in his second term, as he continues to walk a tightrope between the political demands of his campaign and the cold budgetary realities of Washington. Although candidate Bush would like to open the spending spigot and unleash steep tax cuts, President Bush must deal with the fiscal facts of life that make dramatic new proposals like that hard to finance--unless you can cut into popular programs like Medicare and Medicaid, or raise taxes somewhere else.

Bush’s speech comes amid a debate raging within the Administration over whether the President needs to provide further detail on his economic program before the election. Some inside the Administration argue that Bush will come under ever-increasing criticism throughout the fall if he does not offer more concrete proposals, and they have pressed the White House for bold new initiatives on taxes and budget policy. Senior Administration officials note, for example, that a package of small-business tax cuts and other incentives is ready to go whenever the President wants to unveil it.

Bush’s continuing refusal to clearly outline his agenda has given Bill Clinton an opportunity to do it for him. Clinton has already begun to savage an undetailed proposal by the White House to cap mandatory spending on such “entitlement” programs as Medicare and Medicaid to balance the budget. Although Bush has refused to detail the massive cuts that would come under such a spending cap, Clinton has tried to fill in the blanks, warning that Bush’s proposals would cut the incomes of “older Americans with incomes of under $20,000.”

But White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said Wednesday that providing specific numbers could prove to be an easy target for the Democrats and would dilute the Republicans’ efforts to turn attention to the cost of tax increases they say Clinton would seek.

Thus, presenting a broad new national economic policy would have only limited political benefits, and “it would just get picked apart by George Mitchell,” the Senate majority leader, one senior Treasury Department official said with a sigh.