Style Differences Aside, Bush Will See Political Tasks Similar to Clinton’s

What will change when George W. Bush succeeds Bill Clinton as president on Saturday? To Bush fans, the answer is obvious: the moral character of the Oval Office. To Clinton fans, the answer is just as obvious: the Oval Office’s intellectual content.

At the least, the inevitable lists of what’s in and what’s out in Washington will be scrambled. (Out: Martha’s Vineyard and Malibu. In: Crawford, Texas, and Jackson Hole, Wyo. Out: graying middle-of-the-road rock bands. In: big-hat middle-of-the-road country bands. Out: unwinding stress on the StairMaster. In: unwinding stress with a martini. Out: Naomi Wolf. In: Gertrude Himmelfarb.)

And other stylistic changes will be immediately apparent. Movie stars won’t be hanging around the West Wing hallways as much. News conferences may grow more rare too. Though Clinton wasn’t big on prime-time news conferences, Bush probably will hold even fewer of them, preferring more informal exchanges with the media. As a general rule--whether interacting with reporters or delivering speeches--the less formal the circumstance, the better Bush performs.

Even Bush’s language will be different. Clinton, as former chief White House speech writer Michael Waldman recently observed, didn’t produce too many “chiseled phrases,” but he was often spontaneously eloquent, particularly when linking his presidency with far-reaching global phenomena such as the emergence of the Information Age.

Bush’s rhetorical ambitions will be more modest. Chief Bush speech writer Michael Gerson can chisel phrases as memorable as anyone who’s held the job since Ted Sorensen under John F. Kennedy. But mostly Bush aims for a spare, plain-spoken directness, which fits with his personal speaking style as well as the near-universal Republican belief that Clinton’s eloquence was nothing but a con man’s patter. Expect that change to be apparent immediately, in Bush’s (already largely completed) inaugural address.

There will be fewer presidential all-nighters. At the outset of his presidency, Clinton’s disorganization was so great that the staff had to work until the wee hours. Later, even as the White House settled down, Clinton’s meetings could stretch for hours simply because he consumed policy debates as enthusiastically as most people munch through a bowl of pistachios. Bush’s White House will be a more disciplined, businesslike place; no one around him expects to see Bush chewing over policy options late into the night. “People are going to get the sense that the government and the White House is run less like a fraternity house and more like a business,” one senior Bush advisor says.

Bush also may be less visible than the job’s current occupant. Clinton inserted himself into virtually every public controversy during his time--even attempting to mediate the Major League Baseball strike. By contrast, Bush’s style in Texas was to pick a few issues, focus on them relentlessly and avoid, whenever possible, getting entangled in other controversies.

And Bush may simply push himself into the public eye less than his predecessor, who sought attention as voraciously as everything else. “The other thing you saw with Clinton, you always got the sense he needed to be loved,” the Bush advisor said. “I don’t think you will have that with President Bush. He’s not going to be in your living room 24-7.”

In all these ways, the Bush advisor predicts that the public will see the Texan’s presidency as a “return to normalcy”--the phrase Warren G. Harding employed in 1920 to describe the reassuring transition he offered from Woodrow Wilson’s tumultuous two terms. In other words, Bush may not reach high points like Clinton’s brilliant 1993 speech in the pulpit from which Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last sermon--but neither is Bush likely to drag the nation through the emotional roller coaster set off by Clinton’s incessant controversies. “It will be a much less flashy, much more toned-down White House,” the advisor says. “It will be a more predictable White House.”

Yet for all of these stylistic and personal differences, Bush will confront political challenges remarkably similar to those that have faced Clinton.

One is governing from a narrow base. Like Clinton in 1992, Bush in 2000 won without capturing the moderate swing voters that he hoped to attract. The result is that Bush enters office owing big debts to the GOP’s conservative base--the same elements of his party whose agenda is most noxious to the swing voters he probably will need to win reelection.

The early skirmishing over Bush’s most conservative Cabinet nominees underscores the tension inherent in that dynamic. Bush tapped John Ashcroft for attorney general and Gale A. Norton as his choice for Interior secretary (as well as Linda Chavez as his first choice for Labor secretary) largely as gestures to conservatives who provided the critical votes for his victory.

But Democrats see the confirmation fights over these nominees as an early opportunity to convince moderate suburbanites that Bush is more conservative than he lets on. Even if Norton and Ashcroft win confirmation, the challenge for Bush will only intensify; Bush is broadly in tune with both, but each is likely to push agendas (on issues from mining on public lands to gun control) that may nudge the new president slightly further right than he’d like to be seen. Much as left-leaning Education and Health and Human Services appointees created headaches for Clinton, Bush’s White House will be challenged to keep the reins on the true believers that Ashcroft and Norton are likely to assemble.

And after fingering Clinton for most of the blame for Washington’s partisan hostilities, Bush may have more empathy for his predecessor after trying to build legislative coalitions at a time when Congress (and the country) is divided almost exactly in half--and the two parties in Washington are locked in a cycle of permanent warfare. Chavez’s quick demise was an immediate reminder to Bush that partisan antagonisms won’t be leaving town when Clinton does. Then again, after purchasing an expensive Washington home, Clinton doesn’t even appear to be leaving town. He is likely to hover over his successor more visibly than any president since Theodore Roosevelt. And that means the comparisons--and perhaps the sparks--between these first two presidents from the baby boom generation have probably just begun.

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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.