Fire From the Right : The GOP blame game is underway and budget director Dick Darman is everybody’s favorite scapegoat. But he says he’s misunderstood.

The choice of advisers is of no little import to a prince; and they are good or not, according to the wisdom of the prince. The first thing one does to evaluate the wisdom of a ruler is to examine the men that he has around him; and when they are capable and faithful one can always consider him wise, for he has known how to recognize their ability and to keep them loyal; but when they are otherwise one can always form a low impression of him; for the first error he makes is made in this choice of advisers.

--”The Prince,” Niccolo Machiavelli, 1532

The Republican blame game is now in full swing. The Democrats are at the gates, a 12-year Republican run seems about to come crashing to an end, and if it does, the cry will go up: “Who lost the White House?”

For Republicans inside and outside the Administration, there will be so many suspects:

There’s Nick Brady over at Treasury. While the economy went down the tubes, he kept talking about a recovery just around the corner, about “robins on the lawn,” bald tires that needed replacing, and how victory for the U.S. Olympic basketball team would boost consumer confidence.

There was John Sununu. Bush needed to take action, not count on Gulf War euphoria to last for 18 months.

And there was Sam Skinner, Sununu’s successor as chief of staff. While he focused on White House paper flow and personnel reorganization early this year, an economic freight train was barreling down the track right at the President.

“Changes should have been made in a lot of places,” sighs one Administration official.

Ah, but the most delicious accusations, the coldest finger-pointing, the real vein-popping anger is reserved for one man--Richard G. Darman, the 49-year-old director of the Office of Management and Budget. The anger is so intense that many Republicans have developed a cartoonish image of Darman. One of the most interesting and complex men in government has been demonized by the right as nothing more than the ultimate villain in a Washington tragedy.

“Is it too late for me to get into your Darman story?” asks Larry Kudlow, an influential Wall Street conservative who is close to Jack Kemp, the Bush housing secretary and new hope of the Republican Party. “Oh, good, let me take a whack at him. He is duplicitous, deceitful, self-promoting and a dissembler, and he has done enormous damage to the President and to the Republican Party,” says Kudlow, who worked with Darman in the Reagan Administration. “He is a negative for George Bush, and his credibility is gone.

“That’s all on the record.”

But what do Republicans really think about Dick Darman?

“Everything Kudlow said about him is precisely correct,” says one White House official. “You could probably add to the list of adjectives, but that pretty much covers them.”

Perhaps the richest quote about Dick Darman came in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month from Stephen Bell, a former Republican Senate Budget Committee staff director: “Remember how I told you that Darman is a no-good, lying SOB, and I said it was off the record? Well, it’s on the record now.”

In an interview last week, Bell added: “Darman is very, very smart, very hard-working, and probably has done more to hurt the Republican Party and this President than any other person.”

Darman counters that he has always been misunderstood by his enemies. He is merely a “long-term idealist and a short-term realist,” a man with a better feel for the sweep of history than his foes, a policy-oriented official who understands that it often takes decades to achieve political goals. Darman notes that issues like vouchers for child care, which he first worked on in the Nixon Administration, have come to fruition during the Bush years. In the meantime, compromises must be made.

The problem his critics have with Darman, however, is that the long term never seems to arrive.

Even the praise that can be rounded up about Darman is rather faint. “He is not quite as talented as he thinks he is--no one could be--but he’s not the devil my Republican friends think he is,” observes William Kristol, chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle.

What has Dick Darman done to deserve such abuse? He has never, ever, been caught up in any personal scandal, never been accused of any malfeasance in office.

A scion of a New England textile family-a reportedly wealthy-Darman has been squeaky clean. He has a very private family life with his wife and two young sons, a lovely home in suburban Virginia, a fine sense of humor and what even his critics agree is a brilliant, highly analytical mind.

He is a tireless worker who understands federal budget issues perhaps better than anyone else in America, and he has a more complete knowledge of the political machinery that makes Washington work than almost anyone else in the White House. He has made himself essential to George Bush.

No, Darman’s perceived misdeeds all stem from policy disputes that are peculiarly Republican, dating back to his early and open disdain for supply-side economics when he served as Chief of Staff Jim Baker’s right arm in Ronald Reagan’s White House. Reaganauts haven’t trusted him since. They charge that Darman has proved time and again that he is not a true believer.

But what has made it worse for his rivals has been that Darman has always been so good at bureaucratic gamesmanship. With Washington experience dating back to the Nixon Administration, he can run rings around his foes before they even realize the game has begun. He has angered so many people because he has won so very often. And he is good at the blood sport of Washington politics because he loves it so much.

But it has been during the Bush Administration that Darman--with far greater power than ever before--has been truly demonized by the Right. While paying lip service early in the Bush years to the President’s pledge not to raise taxes, Darman, focusing on the deficit, quietly pushed for higher taxes. Ultimately, he convinced Bush to sign onto a budget agreement in 1990 that raised taxes but failed to curb the deficit like it was supposed to, a deal that most Republicans now believe marked both the demise of Reaganomics and the beginning of the end for George Bush.

But perhaps his greatest sin in the eyes of his Republican critics has been that he effectively seized control over economic policy in the leadership vacuum that was the domestic side of the Bush Administration--and did next to nothing with that power to help get George Bush reelected. Darman did everything he could, his critics argue, to ensure that the Bush Administration did not break open his cherished 1990 budget agreement to jump start the economy.

Darman argues that the budget pact did not stop the White House from developing new economic policies. Rather, he saw it as a way for the executive branch to dominate budget policy and stop the Democrats from running up the deficit. But his critics note that it also gave his office enormous power. So he wanted to keep it in place at all costs.

“There was a pride of authorship” in the budget agreement that narrowed Darman’s focus on the economy’s larger problems, one senior Administration official observes.

In fact, throughout Bush’s first term, Darman, seconded by Brady, advised Bush that he didn’t need to do anything to stimulate the economy. The recovery was on the way, was baked in the cake, and any effort to cut taxes or otherwise juice things up would simply look irresponsible, and open the way for the Democrats to seize the initiative on tax and budget policy.

“Darman didn’t want to do anything,” says one White House official. Even last fall, as Bush started to come under fire for failing to take action and for looking out of touch, Darman counseled against a dramatic economic recovery package, senior Administration officials say. He managed to delay action until the State of the Union Address in January, telling others there was a “rhythm to these things” that shouldn’t be upset.

Finally, his delaying tactics meant that Bush was too little and too late on the economy, critics inside the Administration argue.

White House sources say that it is emblematic of what went wrong for George Bush that he put Washington’s premier “process guy” in charge of his Administration’s economic strategy. While Darman understood the mechanics of budget policy, he seemed to have no more feel for the “vision thing” than did George Bush. Darman had been putting off his long-term idealism in exchange for his short-term realism for so long--dating back at least to the early days of the Reagan Administration--that he seemed ill-suited to provide overarching direction for economic policy. Darman seemed to truly believe in the need for deficit reduction, the need to lock in tight spending controls to stymie the Democrats, but it was not clear what else he thought was important.

And he got little input from President Bush--to guide him. It is a slight that Darman has heard often, and it rankles; the thought that he is suited to be a career aide, rather than a leader.

“It is said that Jim Baker was smart enough to know that he needed a Dick Darman, but that Dick Darman was not smart enough to know that he needed a Jim Baker,” says one Republican.

So it is no wonder that the most notable feature of economic policy in the Bush Administration was a process--the 1990 budget agreement.

Now, Republicans scream, Darman appears to have had the effrontery to lay bare the inner workings of the Bush White House in the pages of the Washington Post--right in the midst of the presidential campaign.

Darman’s old friend, Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward, has just written a four-part series detailing at great length--and from what appeared to official Washington to be Dick Darman’s perspective--the checkered history of economic policy in the Bush Administration.

To Darman’s legion of critics, the series read like his memoirs. It documented how a pragmatic Darman opposed George Bush’s “Read My Lips” campaign pledge not to raise taxes, how Darman was one of the only people in the Bush Administration who took the ballooning deficit seriously, and how Darman thought it was “sheer idiocy” for President Bush to disavow, during the heat of the campaign season, his 1990 decision to raise taxes. The revelations seemed to reinforce the attacks on Bush by Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton, who has turned Bush’s decision to break his “Read My Lips” promise into a central issue of trust and credibility in the campaign.

In fact, the Woodward series made it look for all the world like Dick Darman had given up on the 1992 presidential election, and had decided to be the first one to reveal his version of history.

What was worse, the series was published in early October, just as a shell-shocked Republican Party was looking for someone to blame for the demise of George Bush. Darman fit the bill perfectly.

It seemed to critics as if Darman had cynically served for nearly four years without believing in the central tenets of his President’s program, and instead had sought at every turn to undermine them.

But now, Dick Darman is feeling aggrieved. Darman understands just how bad that Post series made him look. After extensive negotiations on what he would agree to say for this article (very little), he did decide to go on the record to offer his first public response to the Woodward series.

“I strongly opposed his (Woodward) doing his piece, and told him so,” Darman says. “I told him I would not give him anything he could use for his project, which he said was a book, until after the election, and did not.”

Bob Woodward declined to respond to Darman’s comments.

*

But all the finger pointing at Dick Darman obscures an important point: If he has been sabotaging George Bush’s presidency, why hasn’t George Bush repudiated and fired him?

Well, Bush sort of has and sort of hasn’t. While the Woodward series was running, Bush told an interviewer that Darman had his “full support.” A few days later, after Bush announced that White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker would be in charge of economic policy in a second Bush term, the White House let it be known that there would be a “new economic team” in the second term, and indicated that Darman, Brady and White House chief economic adviser Michael Boskin would not be back. It certainly looked as if the trio was on the way out. “My 11-year old son said, ‘Dad, the kids at school all say that President Bush is not going to keep you,’ ” Darman recalls. “What I said in response was that we’ve got a more important problem at the moment, getting the President reelected. And then I said to him, ‘What’s the worst that could happen; I’d have more time to help with your homework, more time for us to do things together. I’d work less, get paid more, and live a healthier life.’ ” In any case, Darman was back on Air Force One almost immediately after the firing/non-firing, briefing Bush for the presidential debates by playing the role of Clinton.

Certainly, Darman has assumed a lower profile; he has not been seen much lately eating at the White House mess and he has all but stopped attending senior White House staff meetings, sources say.

But he is still OMB director and still a key player in the campaign. And if Bush pulls out a come-from-behind win, few Republicans in Washington are willing to count Dick Darman out completely.

The implications are troubling to many Republicans: What if it means that George Bush shares Dick Darman’s beliefs? What if it means that Bush never really bought into Reaganomics?

Observes conservative economist Allen Meltzer: “Darman gave him bad advice, but Bush took it.”

“Everyone is going to be scuffling for the next 90 days over who lost the soul of the Republican Party,” adds Bell. “But the fundamental thing was that George Bush was the President. And George Bush was not Ronald Reagan.”