Questions Bush Will Face Are Much Easier to Predict Than the Answers

Sure the new year is only a few hours old. But for those bold (OK, reckless) enough to speculate, it’s never too early for fearless predictions.

Well, maybe not that fearless: The political environment is too unsettled to safely predict which party will prosper in this second Bush era. But it’s easier to guess the questions we’ll be asking in the months ahead. Among them:

Can he walk the wire? It may be a good thing that President-elect George W. Bush isn’t a political history buff, because history doesn’t give him much cause for holiday cheer.

Bush is the fourth president to win the White House while losing the popular vote. None of the other three won a second term. Two (John Quincy Adams in 1828 and Benjamin Harrison in 1892) were beaten by the man they defeated four years earlier; the third, Rutherford B. Hayes, didn’t even seek reelection.

Bush, though, proved in the campaign that he’s probably a better politician than any of those predecessors. It’s true that Bush made only limited inroads among the suburban swing voters outside the South who were the principal target for his “compassionate conservative” message. But in an economy this strong, it was a testament to Bush’s skills that he came as close as he did to Al Gore in the popular vote and squeezed out his narrow majority in the electoral college.

Now, though, Bush has to resolve the contradictions inherent in his victory. He had hoped to win by expanding his party’s appeal. Instead, he won by consolidating and mobilizing the Republican base--especially white men, gun owners and religious conservatives. In hundreds, perhaps thousands of governing decisions, Bush will face the same choice: whether to tilt toward the voters who elected him, or the voters he needs to broaden his coalition.

Campaigns never preview the full weight of that tension because it’s easy for candidates to throw a rhetorical bone to each side. The choices are much more difficult to smooth over in office.

Bill Clinton learned that when he saw his pledge to allow gays to serve openly in the military nearly erase, in one stroke, his initial success at positioning himself as a cultural centrist. Bush, for starters, could face similar headaches as his desire to court African Americans and suburban women collides with the right’s expectation that, especially with conservative John Ashcroft at the Justice Department, Bush will roll back affirmative action and make abortion illegal.

To succeed, Bush will need great agility, balance and a tolerance for nuance--all traits Clinton had in abundance. At times, Bush has displayed them too. But he’s never had to apply them to a test as strenuous as the one he’ll soon begin.

Who will lead the opposition? When the last ballot chad fell in Florida, the answer to this question seemed obvious: Al Gore. But when fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton confidant, recently collected enough support to virtually seal his election as the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Democrats everywhere awoke to the same sudden realization: The president isn’t going away.

Senior Gore advisors don’t think Clinton wants to take the lead himself in defining the Democratic alternative to Bush. But they interpret the McAuliffe move--which still must be ratified by the full DNC in February--as a sign that Clinton intends to keep a close eye on how Gore exercises that role, like a parent watching a son he’s left the family business. “Anyone who would ever think Bill Clinton will just fade away is making a big mistake,” one senior Gore aide says.

This is a situation engineered for conflict. The closest parallel might have come in 1908 when a young, energetic Theodore Roosevelt bequeathed the presidency to William Howard Taft; Roosevelt gradually grew so disenchanted with his successor’s performance that he launched a third-party candidacy four years later that helped oust Taft from the White House.

The Constitution, if nothing else, bars Clinton from that option, but some insiders say he’s already been grumbling about the way Gore positioned himself. Republican circles are buzzing with the rumor that Clinton offhandedly told Bush, during their meeting last month, that he thought Gore went too far left on cultural issues.

And Bill surely won’t be the only kibitzing Clinton. With her $8-million book deal, her high-profile Washington house-hunt and her humble proposal to eliminate the electoral college, Sen.-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton has already signaled that “deferential” is not the adjective she’s aiming for. Inside Gore’s camp there’s a surprisingly firm consensus that she’s already running for president, if not in 2004 then in 2008.

One play Gore advisors are expecting: a major push from Hillary to court the centrist-leaning Democratic Leadership Council--which has been skeptical of her left-leaning tendencies in the past but was alienated by the throwback populism in Gore’s campaign.

Who will steer the Senate? In resisting Democratic demands for power sharing in the 50-50 Senate, Republicans already are saying that a car can’t have two steering wheels. And with Vice President-elect Dick Cheney’s tie-breaking vote, the GOP can demand that it be allowed to steer the upper chamber.

But to extend (if not torture) the automotive metaphor, it doesn’t do the driver much good to control the steering wheel if the passenger controls the brake. And the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to stop, allows the Democrats to slam the brakes on any idea the party unifies against.

This could be a blueprint for gridlock, unless Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), the majority and minority leaders, can find a way to live together. The stakes for Bush are enormous. In the House, Bush is likely to have support from enough Republicans and conservative Democrats to pass most of his agenda. The Senate looms as a much more serious challenge, partly because there aren’t as many conservative Democrats to court, and partly because Daschle has established a firm hold on his caucus.

Which means the man on the spot may be Lott. Back in 1996, in his first months as leader, Lott showed a shrewd instinct for a deal, but since then he’s become more partisan and less effective. If Lott can’t recover those earlier skills, the Senate may spend most of its time grinding gears.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.

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