The Further Bush Campaign Goes, the Fuzzier His Platform Becomes

In South Carolina last week, George W. Bush looked like an American tourist trying to make himself understood in Japan. Faced with listeners who don’t speak English, the usual tourist impulse is to just talk louder--as if the problem were the volume, not the words.

That’s what Bush did in South Carolina. In New Hampshire, Bush had called Sen. John McCain of Arizona a moderate, said McCain wouldn’t cut taxes enough and trumpeted endorsements from every leading Republican with a pulse (and some almost without). In South Carolina, Bush and his allies called McCain a liberal, insisted even more emphatically that McCain wouldn’t cut taxes enough and wheeled out an endorsement from former Vice President Dan Quayle. (Bush-Quayle: Now there’s a forward-looking image.) The stage is growing so crowded when Bush speaks, it’s become difficult to pick him out of the crowd.

Which is exactly the problem. Bush doesn’t need any more testimonials; he needs more definition. Bush may be the first presidential candidate in recent memory to grow fuzzier as the campaign progresses. Pumping up the volume in South Carolina on the same vaporous message that failed him during the final days in New Hampshire is working about as well for him as talking louder does for the average tourist.

Finding something fresh to say was not always a problem for Bush. He began the campaign with a distinctive message. Like Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush promised that he would reform his party and point it back toward the center. Both in policy and style, Bush positioned himself midway between Clinton and Newt Gingrich. He promised to restore honor to the Oval Office, but he also said he would rebuild bipartisan cooperation in Washington and extend a hand to the needy with his compassionate conservatism. Bush didn’t propose much new government spending, but he argued that government had a role to play as a catalyst in solving social problems. In his first major policy speech last summer, he denounced as “a destructive mind-set . . . the idea that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved.”

Somewhere along the way, though, Bush and his advisors lost faith in this call for new directions. Believing their principal challenge would come from Steve Forbes on the right, they moved to preempt him by offering a massive across-the-board tax cut ripped from the conventional conservative playbook.

Bush’s tax cut quickly eclipsed everything else in his campaign. Originally, Bush seemed to envision it as a shield against Forbes on the right; but when McCain emerged as the principal challenger from the center, the Texas governor tried to use it as a sword. In his stump speech, Bush still talked about reforming education and mobilizing faith-based charities. But in debates and his television advertising, he increasingly argued that he should be the nominee because he would cut taxes more than McCain. Bush even began salting his speeches with the formulaic denunciations of government that he himself had once denounced.

McCain, though, didn’t budge. Standing in front of a huge American flag at one town meeting just before the New Hampshire vote, he looked and sounded like George C. Scott in “Patton” as he railed against Bush’s tax plan as profligate and tilted toward the wealthy. “Don’t you think we ought to pay down that debt?” McCain asked his packed-to-the-rafters audience, which roared in approval.

Bush, with those cheers distantly echoing in his ears, seemed to lose confidence in his new message as primary day approached. First, he inserted into his television advertising McCainesque promises to stabilize Social Security and pay down the national debt. Then over the final few days, Bush didn’t say much of anything; he went snowmobiling and inner-tubing and bowling. He whined about being homesick. He looked like a college student on winter break.

Bush advisors had believed McCain led in New Hampshire through January because he had been working the state while Bush was shivering in Iowa cornfields. They believed, or hoped, that once voters could compare the two men head-to-head, Bush would regain lost ground. Instead the up-close comparison did not serve Bush well. In the week the two men competed head-on, McCain’s margin widened.

Conducting a focus group among undecided independent voters in New Hampshire, GOP pollster Frank Luntz was stunned at the contrasting reaction to the two candidates. Voters saw McCain as mature, honest, forthright; the opposite of a typical politician. Voters didn’t necessarily dislike Bush, but neither did they see in him any of those qualities. In fact, they didn’t see in Bush much of anything at all; for many voters, Bush, like the Cheshire Cat, had vanished except for his grin--or smirk, as they called it. To voters, said Luntz, “the smirk says a lack of seriousness and it says a lack of dedication.”

Bush didn’t lose New Hampshire because he moved too far to the right. But by abandoning his own message of challenge to the GOP, he has allowed himself to become the defender of the status quo. That’s not necessarily a great place to be in a party that has been wiped out in the past two presidential campaigns. In South Carolina, Bush protested that he deserved to be the outsider since he lives in Austin and McCain lives in Washington. But change is a matter less of address than attitude. And, though Bush’s ideas on education and social policy are more innovative than his rival’s, the Texas governor now seems far more a creature of GOP conventional wisdom than the gleefully heretical McCain.

That doesn’t mean Bush won’t win the nomination. Upscale and moderate, New Hampshire was an ideal audience for McCain’s reform message; South Carolina will more tellingly measure whether rank-and-file Republicans want to follow his crusade. McCain will also have to withstand heightened efforts by Bush to paint him as a lobbyist-befriending Washington insider. But in this unexpectedly close contest, McCain has one advantage: He knows exactly what he wants to say. When a pro-tobacco group fired off television ads in South Carolina last week criticizing McCain over his 1998 legislation to raise cigarette taxes, the senator roared back: “I am honored by attacks from people who have addicted our children.” On the same day, Bush announced more endorsements.

*

See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.