Bush Walks Pragmatic Path That Clinton Made Familiar

Every time George W. Bush looked over his right shoulder this week, he saw conservatives accusing him of abandoning his party’s principles. Whenever he looked over his left, he saw Vice President Al Gore accusing him of using centrist rhetoric to hide his conservative principles.

This ideological cross-fire is contradictory: Bush can’t be both a moderate masquerading as a conservative, and a conservative masquerading as a moderate. But it is singularly revealing. It marks the Texas governor’s determination to bridge some of the traditional distinctions between the parties.

Indeed, with his call for a “compassionate conservatism” and his insistence this week that his party has grown overly hostile to government, Bush appears to be followingthe same model Bill Clinton developed with his “New Democratic” appeal. “This is Clintonism in reverse,” says Will Marshall, director of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, which is close to Clinton. “Bush faces the same challenge that Clinton faced--which is how to update his party’s agenda to deal with new realities.”

Bush’s effort to chart a new direction for the GOP creates the same opportunities--and presents the same risks--that Clinton has faced in his efforts to redirect the Democrats. At its best, this modernizing instinct could expand the party’s appeal to new voters with an innovative synthesis of liberal and conservative ideas previously considered incompatible--like Clinton’s call for welfare reform in 1992, or the education reform agenda that Bush outlined last week.

But, like Clinton before him, Bush is facing incessant charges of either abandoning his convictions, hiding them or lacking any in the first place (as when he refused to join other Republicans in urging Patrick J. Buchanan to leave the party). These accusations of placing polls over principle could pose a threat to Bush, especially in a Republican primary where “Clintonesque” is hardly a term of endearment.

“If you try to confuse and muddy the waters, that is not what we need after seven years of spin and sizzle from Washington,” charges Steve Forbes, who is trying to rally conservatives against Bush in the primary. ‘I think people want a clear, substantive choice. They’ve had enough of mush.”

Candidates Divided Over Path to GOP Win

Embedded in these tactical confrontations between the Republican contenders is a deeper division over what it will take for the GOP to win back the presidency. Forbes and fellow conservative activist Gary Bauer base their criticisms of Bush on the belief that the GOP can win in 2000 by offering an ideologically polarized message that inspires core conservative voters. But Bush’s strategy and agenda is premised on the assumption that after averaging just 39% of the vote in the past two presidential elections, Republicans have to reach out in new ways to centrist voters.

“There is a real big difference of opinion,” says William J. Bennett, the former Education secretary under President Reagan. “The critical issue is our attitude toward government: Do we instinctively reject it, or instead do we say we are going to grab it and do something about it? That’s the shift that has to take place for conservatives to govern and win a majority.”

All of this mirrors the disputes Clinton has faced in the Democratic Party. That argument is flaring again in the 2000 Democratic race, with Bill Bradley--and in more purist form actor Warren Beatty--accusing Clinton and Gore of abandoning too many of the party’s principles in a search for the center.

These parallel charges of betrayal--from Forbes and Bauer against Bush, and Bradley and Beatty against Gore--reflect the tension created in both parties by the erosion of partisan loyalties in the electorate. That process has left both parties without a reliable majority of support for an overly ideological agenda, many analysts agree.

“The problem is that neither pure undiluted conservatism or pure undiluted liberalism commands majority support,” says Marshall. “Sorry, Warren Beatty, and sorry, Dan Quayle. The reality is that to win today you have to create a different synthesis that holds onto the core of your base and brings in a lot of voters who are floating free.”

Like Clinton before him, Bush has walked a fine line in trying to court those less-partisan voters without alienating his party’s conservative base.

The education proposal he unveiled on Tuesday illuminates the balancing act. Bush urged new federal subsidies for parents who send their children to private schools, and proposed to convert all federal elementary and secondary education spending into block grants--both core conservative priorities. But he coupled those proposals with initiatives more recently associated with Democrats: a demand that states annually test students in reading and math and then hold schools accountable for the results.

Likewise, last summer, Bush blended conservative and liberal priorities when he called for new initiatives to help the poor, but proposed that they be run through grass-roots faith-based charities championed by many conservatives. Bush hasn’t yet challenged his party’s base as forcefully as Clinton did on issues like welfare reform, trade and crime. But the Bush proposals reflect the same spirit of blending liberal and conservative themes in new ways.

Though Bush’s proposals envision more federal activism than many Republicans prefer, they have drawn only limited criticism from the right. He’s drawn much more heat for following Clinton down a second path: “triangulating” in the race by separating himself from Congress. After criticizing congressional Republicans on Sept. 30 for proposing to restructure a tax credit for the working poor, Bush riled the right on Tuesday by saying that his party has “too often painted an image of America slouching toward Gomorrah” and too often “confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself.”

Conservatives reacted to Bush’s call for “an optimistic, governing conservatism” with as much fury as liberals did when Clinton declared, in 1996, that “the era of big government is over.” Talk show host Rush Limbaugh said: “The more he speaks the more troubled I am about his candidacy.”

Bush shares a second line of vulnerability with Clinton: the charge that he’s trying to be all things to all people. He has taken several positions seemingly aimed at covering as many bases as possible. Recently, for instance, he called for raising the minimum wage, but allowing states to opt out of the increase. Earlier, he said he supported the “spirit” of California’s Proposition 209--which ended the state’s affirmative action programs--but didn’t say whether he backed the initiative itself. He says he personally wants to ban abortion but will not seek a ban as president.

Risk of Looking ‘Like Clinton Jr.’

After seven years in which Clinton has been accused repeatedly of similar straddling, all of this strikes critics as too clever--and a potential vulnerability. “The risk is that he’ll look more like Clinton Jr., than Bush Jr.,” says Brian Kennedy, formerly the chief strategist for Lamar Alexander, who quit the race in August.

It’s not relevant in the Republican primary, but if Bush makes it to the general election, he’ll undoubtedly find himself fending off a third accusation Clinton would recognize: the charge that all his seeming moderation is an elaborate cloak over a more traditionally ideological agenda.

Bush’s father in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996 accused Clinton of being a closet liberal; now, Gore and other Democrats make the case that Bush would govern more conservatively than he’s running by citing his opposition to abortion and most gun control, and his indication that he would sign the Republican congressional tax cut. On Wednesday, for instance, Clinton cited several of those issues to suggest that Bush’s differences with the Republican Congress are being exaggerated. “He has stuck with them,” the president insisted.

Republicans, though, never succeeded in convincing most voters that Clinton was a doctrinaire liberal, and it may be just as difficult to paint Bush into a similar corner on the right. Ironically, one of Bush’s best defenses against the Democratic charge that he would lurch the country to the right may be the mirror-image accusations from his Republican opponents that he’s dangerously steering the GOP toward the center.