The Mind of the President : In Making Policy, George Bush Relies on a Group of Comfortable Managers and Shies Away From Grand Ideas

A MAN WHO HAS KNOWN GEORGE BUSH AND worked closely with him for nearly 15 years tells this fanciful story to suggest what makes his friend tick.

It is the middle of the 19th Century, and Bush is drinking ale with his friends in the East. Suddenly he tells them he’s going to head West, covered wagon and all, determined to settle the frontier. Like so many of his era, he is joining the march toward fulfillment of America’s Manifest Destiny.

“Are you thinking about Manifest Destiny?” a companion wonders.

“No,” Bush replies, “I’m thinking about Indians.”

The story, the friend says, gets to the heart of Bush’s being. “He doesn’t sit still long enough to be introspective. He’s busy, busy, busy. He goes, goes, goes. He is a doer.” And to put it simply, the Bush loyalist adds: “Ideas get him uncomfortable.”

Today, as he reaches for a second term that only a year ago seemed his for the asking, the fact that the President is “uncomfortable” with ideas may turn out to be a critical handicap. The nation has endured, even thrived, under Presidents who were less than intellectuals, and George Bush has risen to the top and achieved much without being a champion of many new concepts or theories. But suddenly, ideas matter. The 1992 election is about change--who has the vision and the boldness to lead the nation out of its morass. And Bush lacks a clearly projected vision for setting things right. Even loyal Republicans worry that Bush has too rarely used his office as a platform for offering a clear agenda. Too often, they say, he has seemed a leader adrift.

Polls show that voters regard Bush as a man of character and integrity. But the surveys also betray a troubled uncertainty about just what it is he stands for and intends to do if reelected. That he has not become the “Education President” or the “Environmental President,” as he pledged he would four years ago, may not surprise voters who expect politicians to fall short on campaign promises. And when Congress is controlled by an opposing party, as it has been throughout Bush’s presidency, no President can hope to see his agenda untarnished. But whatever allowances Americans may be willing to make for Bush’s record, they remain deeply concerned about the condition of the country, its direction and this President’s willingness to embrace new ideas. Having seen him break his “Read my lips” pledge not to raise taxes, they wonder how durable his more recent conversion to the cause of change may be.

Bush’s harshest critics see his presidency as symbolic of a Washington devoid of ideas for tackling a lengthening list of economic and social problems. But that is unfair, both to the capital and to the Bush Administration. Washington has always been a magnet for innovators, and Bush’s White House is no exception. Indeed, ideas from advocates of change have burbled beneath the surface of the Administration like an irrepressible spring. Housing Secretary Jack Kemp called for radical revamping of the nation’s urban policies. Environmental Protection Agency chief William K. Reilly urged a speedy reckoning with global warming and the growing ozone hole. Aides to Vice President Dan Quayle recommended discouraging unnecessary lawsuits by making the loser pay all court costs. Others pushed for immediate across-the-board tax relief and welfare reforms to encourage work and savings.

The problem is that, in the midst of all this, the President himself has seemed oddly aloof. Only the palest versions of these ideas have managed to emerge from the filter around Bush. On legal reform, the White House chose to demonstrate its activism only with modest pilot programs. On the environment, global-warming remedies were delayed, the Clean Air Act diluted by weakened regulations. Welfare reform turned passive and laissez-faire. Only riots in Los Angeles elevated urban affairs to the top of the White House agenda--and then only ephemerally, as political woes and foreign-policy challenges reclaimed available attention. Missing, in this realm of domestic issues, has been willingness on the part of George Bush to plunge into the maelstrom of debate, pick a winner and ride it out of the storm.

A high-level aide describes Bush’s tenure as “somewhere between ideological rigor mortis and completely adrift.” This is a President, associates note, who this summer told Republican visitors that his second-term agenda would be shaped by “whatever comes up.” He is not a politician who looks at public policy as an extension of himself.

Bush has a strong record on foreign policy, which critics, noting that those achievements have not been matched at home, interpret as evidence of his aversion to domestic policy. Even he admits that he is more comfortable in the realm of foreign policy; Democrats joke that only in this election year--the quincentennial of Columbus’ voyage--is Bush discovering America. But those who have known the President longest say the answer is more complicated.

He has based his life less on ideology, they say, than on values, a belief in family, friends, loyalty, honesty, decency, fair play, duty and valor. Once more shunning anything so abstract as Manifest Destiny, he has plotted his trek toward a second term on one modest proposition: Trust me. I am the kind of man who will keep the wolves at bay.

As guideposts for life, the kinds of values Bush esteems can help a person to act with prudence and courage. Yet, when it comes to shaping public policy they only suggest the way in which a leader should proceed--not a course to follow. And when broad values are used in place of a more specific political ideology, the results can be unpredictable. Vivid personal memories of World War II may have helped Bush translate the principles into foreign-policy activism. But his experience of domestic matters has been more abstract, offering no such ready compass. In the White House, the values that can guide a man may leave a government without a map.

When issues become complicated, Bush’s deeply held principles may in fact make him even less decisive. His ability to act boldly is restrained at times by his loyalty to friends, aversion to conflict and the kind of innate caution that leaves many Republicans nostalgic for the rigid world view of Ronald Reagan. “When I worked in the Reagan White House,” says a former senior staff member with close ties to the Bush Administration, “I knew every day without being told what I was supposed to do: cut taxes, fight Russians, reduce government spending. It was just in the air.” Not so, he adds, of a Bush White House in which the agenda is ad hoc. “If you don’t show up for a meeting, you don’t get the orders.”

Others draw more pointed distinctions. Robert Moffett, who served in the Reagan Administration as a top official of the Department of Health and Human Services, speaks glowingly of the direction that Reagan’s conservative philosophy offered. “If a congressional staff member called up and said ‘my boss is thinking about this amendment or that amendment,’ ” remembers Moffett, now a domestic policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, “there wasn’t a blank stare about what the Administration position would be.”

The Ronald Reagan White House ever-honored a tradition born out of Barry Goldwater’s “The Conscience of a Conservative.” But if there were a single treatise by which Bush has abided, it might be an etiquette manual. “What George Bush believes in are good, honorable things,” a senior White House official says. “But it doesn’t tell you what to do when you get up in the morning. And I think the course of this Administration shows that.”

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WITH THE ELECTION SO CLOSE, MOST REPUBLICANS ARE UNcomfortable about speaking ill of the man they still hope will win a second term. But the subject of George Bush and ideas is plainly one to which some have given considerable thought. Some of those close to him go so far as to say this: To speak of Bush and grand ideas is to venture into a world of oxymorons.

When conversations veer too sharply toward the philosophical, friends say, he is bound to make his disapproval clear. “How many butterflies might land on the head of a pin?” the President might ask. Former Rep. Thomas (Lud) Ashley, a Bush classmate at Yale, says it’s his friend’s way of saying “let’s move on.” Bush’s view of the world hews toward the pragmatic, Ashley says. “I don’t think he enjoys the dissecting of a problem and looking at every aspect of it. He is on the move and his mind is on the move. He doesn’t like to spend long periods of time focused on the esoteric aspects of a problem.”

That side of Bush has become even more evident in a race that pits him head to head on the nightly news against a candidate whose predilections could hardly be more different. In many ways, Bill Clinton is the ultimate wonk, a voracious reader of his professor-friends’ tomes, a man eager to discuss policy minutiae in mind-numbing detail. Not so his Republican rival.

“I consider George Bush the paradigm action addict of 20th-Century America,” says Victor Gold, a former speech writer for Bush and the man who helped the then-vice president draft his 1987 autobiography. “He is a man of action and activity. He is not a man of great introspection.” Admirers like Gold regard this as an asset. The rigors of the modern presidency, as they point out, can leave little time for contemplation, and the rhythms of the White House place a premium on instincts and stamina. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, Bush was quick to take a resolute stand. By contrast, even five months later, Clinton made clear that he remained of two minds about the need for military action.

But the difficulty for Bush, his friends say, is that intuitive feelings for right and wrong do not translate as easily into domestic policy--especially at a time when voters have become so troubled by the state and direction of the country that they are looking for leaders who will fix it, not merely maintain the status quo. The nexus may become even more complicated for a leader like Bush who has never fully answered the question, “What should government do?” Ashley, who shares Bush’s patrician roots but went on to become a liberal Democratic congressman, sees his friend as constrained by the lessons taught by “a proliferation of programs intended to do good things that they have not done.” His sense of compassion has sometimes driven him to support activist government efforts to secure greater equity for the oppressed, as he did in supporting the Americans with Disabilities Act. But those instincts are often blunted by sentiments deeply rooted in his generation of Republicans. That philosophy “says most of the stuff we call the domestic side of government is stuff government shouldn’t be doing,” says Rep. Vin Weber, a Minnesota Republican and critic of what he calls the GOP’s “idea vacuum.”

As the congressman implies, such a mind-set carries a powerful impulse of caution. While government can enforce a wide range of dictates, Bush dislikes such mandates. In claiming the mantle of the Education President, he stressed that there were limits to a federal role in the classroom. And if he sometimes cannot seem to stay still, his deeper inclination is to let well enough alone.

It is no coincidence that Bush’s domestic agenda--unlike the New Deal, the Great Society or Bill Clinton’s New Covenant--does not bear a name of its own. Asked who America’s enemy had become, he once replied, “Instability.” Even his global “new world order” is, at its heart, an exhortation to play by the rules.

From the beginning, Bush made clear that he did not idealize activism in the White House. He told The Times in 1988 that his role model as President would be Dwight D. Eisenhower. The aspiration seemed apt. Like Bush, Eisenhower was not known for his eloquence. Nor, for that matter, was he known for setting a broad philosophical tone. Eisenhower was a general, used to tackling assignments one by one. In his eight years in the White House, crises arose--Suez, Little Rock, Hungary--and decisions were made. Missions defined; missions accomplished.

In accepting the nomination in 1988, Bush, too, had presented himself as a man of missions defined and missions accomplished. In an interview just a few weeks later, he said he admired Eisenhower for “attracting good people to office and delegating, and yet leading through spelling out clearly what he wanted--I thought all that was good.” He vowed: “I would set a philosophical direction.”

Indeed, Eisenhower sometimes did manage to convey a sense of vision. One such time was February, 1955, when Eisenhower asked Congress to press ahead with his plan for establishing the National Highway Program. It was a landmark in the nation’s development and--from a man remembered as a no-nonsense, gimme-the-job-and-I’ll-get-it-done sort of guy--an occasion to look ahead. His language, in a special message to Congress, imparted his own sense of America and view of the future. “Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods,” he said. “Together, the uniting forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear--United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts.”

Now, jump ahead to the winter of 1991. George Bush, the 41st President of the United States, stands before a crowd of politicians and hard-hats, their wingtips and work boots spattered with mud. He has flown early to a rain-soaked construction site for State Highway 360 just outside Euless, Tex., to sign what he described as the most important such bill since Eisenhower launched the interstate system 3 1/2 decades before. This measure will allocate $151 billion for highways and mass transit over six years and is intended to move the United States into the next generation of transportation beyond the interstates. The President talks of the ravages of drunken driving. He even quotes Isaiah--”the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain”--and wonders aloud whether Isaiah could have had the interstate highway system in mind.

But when he attempts to capture the historic moment, this is what he offers: “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” There is no mistaking his affection for the point. “It will enable us to build and repair roads, fix bridges and improve mass transit; keep Americans on the move, and help the economy in the process,” Bush says. “But really, it is summed up by three words: Jobs, jobs, jobs. And that’s the priority.”

It is a simple statement, almost passionate in its pragmatism. Offered at a time when the nation’s focus had fixed on the troubled economy, it testified to Bush’s basic instinct: to confront whatever is at hand. It is the same tendency Bush exhibits several months later when he ultimately cuts bureaucratic corners to hurry aid to victims of Hurricane Andrew. But the words remain mundane. They are those of the problem-solver, not one comfortable in stepping back to ponder cause or effect.

It is not, his friends insist, that George Bush lacks the capacity for “the vision thing.” As a son of privilege in Greenwich, Conn., then as a Phi Beta Kappa economics major at Yale, Bush had every chance to develop a coherent view of the world. But that WASPish upbringing seemed also to have left him impelled to suppress it. “He is not even convinced that his own reactions to right and wrong are to be trusted,” says a former Cabinet member. “He’s worried that his own background, his own upbringing, makes him think in different terms.”

Some of that tentativeness derives from collisions of time and place: 44 years after Bush moved to the oil fields of Texas, commentator Molly Ivins can still make local audiences roar by reminding them that real Texans don’t use “summer” as a verb. A Northeastern Republican by birth and temperament, Bush learned quickly the dangers of betraying too much of himself. As a freshman congressman, determined to take up where his father had left off, Bush chose to sponsor the kind of family-planning legislation that had made his father a popular Connecticut senator. The younger Bush quickly became known as “Rubbers” in some Capitol corridors--not, he quickly realized, the kind of label a Houston congressman might seek.

Bush also came of age at a time of deep strains within the GOP, with his birth-bred faith in his party tested by the national uproar over the Vietnam War. As Watergate unraveled, he was serving uncomfortably as Republican Party chairman, which led him to tell a friend later: “I wouldn’t care if I never see Richard Nixon again.” But faced with choices between his instinct and ambition, Bush has repeatedly chosen the latter. To become Ronald Reagan’s running mate in 1980, he was willing to retract both his support for abortion rights and his condemnation of “voodoo economics.”

Rarely does he convey a sense that policy is something he has a personal stake in. “It’s this incredible preppy thing,” a ranking aide says. “I think he believes strongly in certain things, but he’s afraid to show it. You always have to have this certain reserve.”

That combination of flexibility and reserve has confounded even those well-acquainted with unideological leaders. “It is damned hard to see what the guy stands for: what he believes in, where he wants to go, when he is willing to act, what gets his dander up,” says Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower’s biographer. “He is always like Jello. He’ll melt in your hand when you try to examine him.”

But outsiders are missing something crucial, says Torie Clarke, the Bush campaign’s spokeswoman. “He is the most personable, caring, compassionate person you will ever meet. And he cares what his friends and family think. But I know that doesn’t come through . . . .” she said in a speech last month to a women’s leadership conference.

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CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS HAD HOPED THAT BUSH MIGHT RELY ON OTHERS to make up for what he lacks in terms of ideological purity, but Bush has surrounded himself with “preppy, preppy, Establishment Republicans, risk-averse and wanting to do the right thing,” complains the former Cabinet official. “It’s all pretty conventional.”

His caution has been reinforced by the temperament of a White House staff that until a recent shake-up was the most passive in more than a decade. And among his advisers, he remains closest to those most like him.

His inner circle wears wealth and privilege like a uniform: Jim Baker, a man born to wealth in Texas, who sought bigger challenges in Washington after tiring of his life as a Texas lawyer--now Bush’s chief of staff; Nick Brady, the former chairman of Wall Street’s Dillon Read, who settled in with the New Jersey horse set--his Treasury secretary; Bob Mosbacher, the Texas oilman and son of a yachtsman, who left the top job at the Commerce Department to take titular chairmanship of the Bush campaign--now the GOP’s top fund-raiser.

His Cabinet ranges widely in its political philosophy, from the deep conservatism of Atty. Gen. William P. Barr to the moderate Republicanism of Treasury Secretary Brady. But when it comes to innovation, almost all behave more like cautious executives than as champions of a cause.

Those who have watched the Administration closely say Bush simply feels more comfortable with managers than with ideologues. “The consistent characteristic of Bush appointees is that they are people Bush knows, trusts, gets along with, and that is far more important than ideology,” says David Mason, a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration. A former senior official in the Reagan White House put it differently: “He prides himself on getting things done, even at the margins. In terms of grand ideas, that’s some thing foreign to George Bush, and he has surrounded himself basically with people of the same mold.”

Such collegiality has clearly helped Bush along in that quest to “get things done,” reinforcing the directed nature that has seen him perform at his best in a foreign-policy crisis. At ease with such trusted advisers as Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser, Bush was never seen to waver in his single-minded campaign to drive Saddam Hussein’s armies from Kuwait. He won acclaim for his steady management of the U.S. response to last summer’s attempted Soviet coup. So, too, for securing an extraordinary arms-reduction pact as the Soviet Union began to dissolve.

But again, the contrast between his willingness to act boldly in crises and his discomfort with new ideas has aroused vocal critics. Despite emphatic declarations of a “new world order,” Bush sometimes seems at a loss when it comes to the problems of a reconfigured globe. His Administration has mostly watched from the sidelines as civil warfare in the former Yugoslavia offered a grim picture of a new Europe. As power in Moscow passed from Mikhail S. Gorbachev to Boris N. Yeltsin and the Soviet empire was fractured, Bush clung to old friends and old ways. Even former President Richard M. Nixon criticized what he called his fellow Republican’s inadequate attention to the needs of a new Russia.

And while his overall foreign-affairs record remains little-blemished, Bush has in some ways become a prisoner of those successes. Their very magnitude, reinforced by the end of the Cold War, has caused Americans to turn their focus inward: from victories won afar to what remains undone at home. Hoping to negotiate a similar shift, Bush and his team have lately sought to assure voters that a team that changed the world is now best-equipped to change America. In the domestic realm, however, crises tend to be less clear-cut; and policy-making consequently relies more upon innovation and enterprise.

For all his own innate caution, Bush as domestic-policy manager has proven willing to tolerate activism and even dissent. He chose not to muzzle Kemp, an advocate of aggressive urban policies, even when the housing secretary was critical of him. He permitted Reilly, the environmental guru, to wage running battles against the White House staff.

From such quarters have come the short list of initiatives that the White House insists are as bold as Bush’s actions in the Persian Gulf. There is the “enterprise zone” plan to encourage investment in inner cities by reducing the tax burden. There are the efforts to reform the civil justice system in ways that might reduce the business-inhibiting costs of litigation. There is his support for welfare reform through waivers granted to states willing to experiment with new rules.

That none of these proposals has won congressional approval does not stop Bush from using them as symbols of his combativeness. But other Republicans say the examples actually underscore his caution.

He gave Kemp tolerance but little backing in his fight to change urban policy. He let Quayle take the lead on legal reform. He avoided issuing federal guidelines for a welfare-rules change. All too often and all too easily, critics complain, he has found ways to see both sides of the question. “It’s not that he’s got the wrong ideas,” says a former White House official, “but that he doesn’t fight hard enough for them.”

Former Education Secretary William J. Bennett blames that lack of passion on Bush’s apparent discomfort with translating his instincts into politics. Instead of acting, he’s likely to test the water. “You find out what the other guy’s instincts are,” Bennett says. “That’s the way a gentleman does it.”

A current Bush aide describes the problem more bluntly: “Ideas have consequences, and standing up for them means making enemies. George Bush just doesn’t seem to want to do that.”

Take, for example, one idea that Bush himself touts as “innovative”: the school-choice plan, introduced as part of a package of “America 2000” reforms designed to “reinvent American education.” The plan would for the first time permit parents to spend federal funds for their children’s tuition at private and parochial schools, putting lower- and middle-income parents on equal footing with the wealthy, who can already afford private education. And because parents could also apply their tax-funded vouchers of $1,000 per child toward improved public school programs, all schools would gain new incentives to improve.

Bush learned of the idea from Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee governor he soon was to name secretary of education, and began to talk about it soon after he took office. But it was more than two years before he unveiled a formal plan--and another 14 months before he put forward its details. What Bush proposed in June remains determinedly modest. It would provide only $500 million in federal funds to establish pilot programs in a relatively small number of cities and towns around the nation. Of the nation’s 40 million schoolchildren, only 500,000, less than 2%, would benefit.

Some Bush loyalists say the caution of the President’s proposal simply reflects his realism. The very idea of school choice remains so controversial, they say, that to press for more than test cases risks outright defeat. And powerful advocates of public education are unlikely to accept major changes in the way favored programs are subsidized.

To many of its advocates, however, the scope of the experiment sounds strangely tentative. Even within the Administration, the plan has left some advisers feeling somewhat let down. If school choice is such a good idea, some Administration officials say privately, it should be extended to its logical conclusion. The vouchers should be made available to all, supplanting federal aid as the main vehicle for government support for education.

Such a plan, they concede, might well be destined to fail its first test. But they contend that a sign, and not just a symbol, of presidential commitment is needed to stir national sentiment. Says Congressman Weber: “They haven’t waged a real battle.”

There may be a blessing in such restraint. The senior White House official says the irony of Bush’s tenure lies in the fact that “beneath the surface, a lot of these ideas have been debated, fought over and matured.” But already such activists have begun to look ahead to a next generation of Republicans. “In the end,” the official says, “this is going to be remembered as a transitional presidency.”

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WHEN THE PERSIAN GULF War left George Bush with record-high popularity, the manner in which he chose to wield his clout was telling. Rather than turning to domestic affairs, he gave top priority to seeking a breakthrough in the Middle East peace process.

In some ways, the choice was altruistic; history will remember him kindly for it, Weber suggests. But it squandered Bush’s best chance to send a signal that he was determined to spend foreign policy dividends on domestic needs. Returning veterans who came home to a postwar America where job prospects were bleak began to complain about misplaced priorities. Other Americans, whose attention spans had seemed to shorten under cable-news bombardment, also felt the flush of victory fade. But somehow it was easier for him to see the way clear in Jerusalem than in Washington, where Congress and budgets were always standing in the way.

Bush himself has been frank in acknowledging that motivation. Better to use his energy where it might make a difference, he has said, than spend it in Capitol Hill battles doomed to defeat. “Some people say, why can’t you bring the same kind of purpose and success to the domestic scene as you did in Desert Shield and Desert Storm? And the answer is: I didn’t have to get permission from some old goat in the United States Congress to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. That’s the reason,” Bush says over and over again. The empty clash with Congress that followed served in large part to underscore Bush’s longstanding complaints about government-by-gridlock.

But the test of an urgent domestic crisis also shed light on the President’s discomfort in an unfamiliar realm. As racial violence in Los Angeles exploded in outrage this spring, the President who had drawn a line in the sand and vowed “This will not stand!” after Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait, seemed at a loss. If Operation Desert Shield showed a willingness to take risks, Bush’s response to the Los Angeles riots revealed a core of caution.

On that Wednesday night when violence first broke out, Bush was in formal attire at a White House state dinner. With four policemen just set free in the Rodney King beating case, his words were: “Let the appeals process take place.” Never mind that a prosecutor is barred from appealing a not-guilty verdict; to Bush, this was clearly not an issue with which a President should be engaged.

By Friday, though, Bush was presented with a second chance. He had decided to address the nation in a prime-time speech from the Oval Office. At last, some aides thought, he would have a chance to speak out at length on urban issues. Presidential assistant David Demarest, who was in charge of speech writing, immediately sat down at his computer terminal in the White House and began work on an orthodox draft emphasizing the importance of law and order.

At the same time, a subordinate, Tony Snow, began from his more modest quarters in the Old Executive Office Building to do something almost unheard of in the Bush White House. Under Reagan, where speeches were an instrument for advancing new if sometimes risky ideas, the drafting process had served as a forum for bitter intra-staff debate. But under Bush, anything that flouted convention tended to get stripped out on its way up a strict hierarchy.

Snow, who had served as editorial page editor of the conservative Washington Times, was proposing that the President take a chance. Instead of strict law and order, he suggested that Bush sound a more compassionate theme. The first words he uttered could be those of King himself, who only that afternoon had implored: “People . . . can we all get along?”

It was a bold stroke, top White House officials agreed. Circulated side-by-side with the more orthodox version, Snow’s draft won a surprisingly positive reception. According to senior aides, Demarest soon found himself hastily assembling a draft that blended law-and-order themes but opened with the words of Rodney King.

Just three hours before the broadcast was to begin, Demarest and then-chief of staff Samuel K. Skinner headed down ever-hushed West Wing corridors to hand-deliver the text to Bush. But as the President scanned the printed words, his face creased with a frown. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Don’t you think we should be talking about law and order first?”

When the nation tuned in that night, it heard the President speak of violence and justice--but first about violence. “What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles is not about civil rights. It’s not about the great cause of equality that all Americans must uphold. It’s not a message of protest. It’s been the brutality of a mob, pure and simple. And let me assure you: I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order.”

As Bush toured the wreckage of Los Angeles the next week, he seemed stunned, even moved, by what he found. But in the end, his response to the speech draft foreshadowed his reaction to recommendations by Kemp and others that he propose a massive new influx of urban aid. The White House position was clear: We have a program that has been blocked by Congress. What we will offer is what has already been offered: more of the same.

The decision reflected a larger dilemma. Having paid little heed to urban problems before the crisis, the White House feared that any change in course would be cast as an admission of failure. It had faced similar perils for much of last year, when, even as an economic recovery stumbled, the President’s watchwords, derived from the Hippocratic oath, remained “do no harm.” Unwilling to embrace innovative ideas to stay a step ahead, when it came to crisis management, Bush found himself out of step instead.

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BUSH IS A MAN EVER-CONSCIOUS that his instincts may not be those of ordinary voters. He has relied throughout his career on a second tier of advisers more skilled at tapping into American sentiments. These outsiders can rarely forge the easy bonds that exist between Bush and men like Baker. But if they are less family than staff, they have been no less indispensable.

There was the late Lee Atwater, the rhythm-and-blues playing South Carolinian who was a master of grass-roots politics. There is Roger Ailes, the New York adman with a reputation for ruthlessness. And, most of all, there is Bob Teeter, the bookish Michigan pollster who specializes in identifying the issues that are on voters’ minds. “Bush wants validation,” the former Cabinet member says, “and he needs other people to give him that.”

Significantly, however, most of the best-known members of this set of advisers have operated in the realm of politics, not policy. The distinction points up a gulf that seems to exist in Bush’s mind between governing and politics. His cautious instincts, and those of his friends, are most on display in what he calls “governing mode.” When he shifts into pure politics, the operatives gain a powerful voice.

The contrasts can be stark. Bush the candidate portrays himself as more decisive, innovative and ideological than Bush the President.

Consider the peculiar pedigree, described by participants in the process, of a proposal he put forward this summer at the Republican National Convention. Trailing by double digits in the polls, Bush and his advisers had recognized for weeks that this was a moment for boldness. Teeter and budget director Richard G. Darman had even convened a small cell of advisers to brainstorm about what new ideas Bush could include in his prime-time speech. But the most striking of all was born in a chance conversation in the Cabinet Room in early August between Darman and a little-known member of Congress.

Fully three months earlier, Rep. Robert S. Walker of Pennsylvania had introduced a plan to permit taxpayers to dedicate up to 10% of their tax payments for deficit reduction, and Walker had heard nothing from the White House. The congressman was not surprised. Bush and his advisers had never assigned high priority to the problems posed by annual deficits, whose accumulation during the President’s tenure caused the national debt to triple. A cure advocated but rarely pressed by the White House was a balanced-budget amendment; the Treasury Department dismissed the Walker checkoff proposal as burdensome and overcomplicated.

Indeed, some Bush aides had privately dismissed the proposal as the kind of pseudo-populist approach they had disdained in Ross Perot’s agenda. Others had been stunned by the challenge posed by a plan that could force spending cuts of $50 billion a year. But much had changed by August, and when Walker began to tell Darman about his tax-checkoff plan, the Republican congressman found an unusually receptive ear. Darman set to work making the idea Bush’s own.

No one saw a need to consult with the President. Not until the Saturday before the convention, when Bush had already begun at Camp David to prepare for the speech, did he first learn of the plan.

There, Darman, Teeter and Robert B. Zoellick, the brainy new deputy chief of staff, found Bush eager to listen. The checkoff plan, they told him, could serve as a deft symbol: a means to cut the deficit and spending at once. More important, its do-it-yourself nature could appeal to the populism that Perot had fanned and Bush had yet to capture. There were no objections. There were hardly even any questions--and no specific discussion of what programs the Administration might cut if Americans flocked to the scheme in earnest. What mattered was this: The President had a plan.

Exactly how Bush would portray it to a prime-time audience remained to be fought out--first in the wooden lodges of Camp David, then during late-night sessions in the Houstonian hotel, Bush’s adopted hometown residence. Zoellick, deputy budget director Robert Grady and speech writer Steven Provost--the White House’s Young Turks--would gradually wrest control of the speech from Raymond Price, the former Richard M. Nixon speech writer who had been brought on board for the job. They discussed how best to frame the tax-checkoff plan to appeal to Perot voters. But neither its details nor implications for domestic programs came up again.

Instead, Bush portrayed the plan in his convention address as a creative way to force Congress to stop wasting taxpayers’ money. Around the country, Bush lieutenants watching focus groups of voters from behind one-way mirrors found that the presentation had the desired effect. The groups responded more positively to the checkoff idea than to any other part of the Bush speech.

For all the sound and fury of confrontation, however, Bush was not willing to explain what programs he would cut in order to make the plan work. As with his call for lower taxing and spending, he refused to “get all bogged down” in such details. An election should offer a choice of philosophies, Bush suggested, not a contest of numbers. And at last he began to step toward giving his proposals a philosophical unity. Later in the campaign, he began labeling a repackaged set of economic proposals as “entrepreneurial capitalism,” finally reaching beyond the simple rhetoric of “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

What remains unclear is whether Bush will remain committed to the domestic agenda he now proposes. And after four years of stasis, advisers harbor little illusion that they can fully overcome the impression of immobility that hangs as an aura around Bush. Even before change became a political byword, it was a dilemma with which they had often wrestled. “The whole problem we’ve got,” rues one of his most loyal advisers, “is that George Bush is a status quo person.”