Although He Failed to Point the Way in Debates, Bush Maps a Clear Course

George W. Bush gets another chance to explain why he should be president when the Republican presidential contenders meet in Iowa tonight for their third debate. He needs the opportunity. In his first two debates, he’s struggled even to explain his agenda, much less defend it. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing to defend.

Bush has provided two principal maps for the program he might pursue as president: the record he has built in five years as Texas governor and the ideas he has advanced in seven major policy speeches as a presidential candidate. Aides say he does not plan any more policy addresses until after the primaries begin next year. Which makes this a good time to assess how well the pieces fit together.

Like Bill Clinton, with his “New Democrat” message, Bush consciously set out to redefine his party. In one sense, with his rallying cry of “compassionate conservatism,” Bush has already succeeded: Like Clinton, he has made himself difficult to pigeonhole ideologically. On balance, he appears more conservative than moderate, but his approach actually harnesses several distinct impulses. On some issues, Bush’s views are staunchly conservative; on some he edges from the right toward the “third way” balance that Clinton has struck.

On questions about taxes, spending and regulation, Bush takes a solid, if not vanguard, conservative view. It’s true he’s gone out of his way to reject the anti-government flourishes identified with the revolutionary class of GOP conservatives in Congress. But on most economic issues, both in Texas and on the campaign trail, Bush could be reading from the collected works of Milton Friedman.

In his stump speech, Bush denounces “regulations that strangle enterprise”; in Texas, he proposed voluntary, not mandatory, reductions in air pollution for older plants under the state’s clean air laws. He wants to let states opt out of a higher minimum wage; to privatize part of Social Security by creating individual investment accounts; and to give states vastly more control over federal education dollars. In Texas, he pushed through legislation limiting product liability suits against business. And, both in Texas and nationally, he’s stressed tax cuts when proposing how to allocate budget surpluses.

It’s on social issues such as poverty and education that Bush strikes new chords. He starts with familiar conservative notes, lauding personal responsibility and traditional moral values. But then he moves out in two directions unusual for Republicans. In his first major speech last summer, he used language associated with Catholic social teachings to argue that society has a moral obligation to reclaim those on the margins--albeit in new ways, by supporting the work of grass-roots, religious charities.

More fundamentally, Bush has repeatedly asserted a role for government in helping to expand opportunity, particularly by reforming public education. Though Bush typically proposes different means toward his ends, in some areas his agenda converges with Clinton’s insistence that government policy must link opportunity and responsibility. Bush’s proposal to require states to test students annually for progress in reading and math (and face sanctions if they don’t narrow the gap between white and minority students) reflects that inclination; so does the focus on savings for the working poor in his tax plan.

On the hot-button values issues, Bush leans back toward the right. He has tried to send some centrist signals on abortion (insisting he won’t apply an anti-abortion litmus test to judicial nominees) and guns (supporting, for instance, an increase in the minimum age for handgun ownership to 21). But he remains opposed to legalized abortion, and in Texas he signed bills barring municipal lawsuits against gun manufacturers and permitting residents to carry concealed weapons. When he recently named his favorite Supreme Court justices, staunch anti-abortion conservatives Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas led the list.

Overall, Bush’s presidential agenda leans to the right of his Texas record. For one thing, his national platform includes a greater emphasis on private school vouchers. More tellingly, he’s proposed tax cuts equal to 83% of the federal surplus he anticipates; in Texas this year, he wanted to use only 48% of the state surplus for tax cuts (with the next biggest chunk going to education). “Government ought to do a few things and do it well,” Bush said in a recent interview. “One way to make sure that part of my philosophy rings true is not to allow the surplus to be spent on programs.”

If he makes it to the general election, Bush will face hard questions about how his tax plan, which includes important benefits for the affluent, squares with the rest of his agenda. Many Democrats believe that Bush undermined his promise of new offensives against social problems (and threatened funding for existing social programs) by proposing a tax cut whose 10-year price tag exceeds $1 trillion. “It’s hard to see where there would be room for any kind of conservative activist initiatives if you really embraced this,” says Will Marshall, director of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank based in Washington.

That critique is only one of many challenges looming for Bush. Like all the contenders in this post-impeachment era, Bush may be judged less on his policy agenda than on his personal qualities. From this angle too, he presents a complex picture. In Texas he has displayed practical political skills the next president will need; he has skillfully courted Democrats and constructed bipartisan legislative compromises to advance his ideas. But as he demonstrated in his first national debates, thinking on his feet isn’t his strong suit; unlike most serious presidential candidates, Bush hasn’t spent years preparing to seek the office, and sometimes it shows.

The Texas-sized question hanging over Bush’s campaign is what measures the public will use to judge him. Will Americans put more weight on his coalition-building skills or his limitations as a policy thinker? Will centrist swing voters be attracted to his nouvelle vision on education and the poor, or be driven away by his more doctrinaire views on guns, the environment and even taxes? For all his lofty poll numbers, Bush can’t feel entirely secure until he learns the answers.