After Boffo Act 1, Bush May Be Panned on Energy Policy

As he launched his new presidency, George W. Bush deliberately focused his first hundred days on proposals with ready-made popular appeal: a tax cut, education reform and a new dose of civility. But with the unveiling of Bush’s national energy plan, it’s clear that the second hundred days will be bumpier than the first.

The honeymoon, in short, may be over.

The energy plan poses a long list of tough choices: between oil drilling and pristine wilderness, coal burning and clean air, nuclear energy and NIMBY (“not in my backyard”). But the president hasn’t yet built a popular mandate behind the conservative solutions he proposes.

Polls suggest that the public doesn’t yet buy Bush’s argument that the nation faces an energy crisis that calls for revamping environmental regulations. Republican members of Congress are nervously urging more emphasis on conservation, soaring gasoline prices and California’s electricity problems. And the Democratic opposition, disorganized and scattershot until now, is beginning to form up as a clearer target comes into view.

Bush faces a daunting test--and the road ahead may be getting steeper. Bush’s aides already are working on their next major proposals: prescription drugs for the elderly, a partial privatization of Social Security, and a massive restructuring of the nation’s armed forces. All will pose tough choices, including how much money to spend on each competing priority.

Like every modern president, Bush is trying to build support for his programs by working with Congress (the “inside game”) and barnstorming the country (the “outside game”). In Texas, then-Gov. Bush built his success as a skilled player of the inside game; but in Washington, with the 50-50 party split in the Senate, where any one defecting senator can derail a bill, the inside game has been tougher than expected.

So the outside game has become more vital. And there, in the eyes of some otherwise-supportive Republicans, Bush still has work to do.

“He’s following in [former President] Reagan’s footsteps, but he still has not developed that fine-tuning to present his issues at a level the average guy can understand,” said Michael K. Deaver, the image maker who made Reagan’s conservatism palatable to millions. “Reagan had it in spades; [former President] Clinton had it in spades and didn’t do anything with it; but Bush doesn’t quite have it yet.”

“I think he has had a tremendously successful Act 1; what he is beginning to address now, with energy policy, is the next act,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, another former Reagan aide. “What we are about to see is whether he can take the political capital he put in the bank [by winning his tax cut] and apply it to other issues.”

Bush aides acknowledge that the coming months will be challenging, but, naturally, predict that their chief will prove equal to the task. “There’s no question that the president began his second hundred days by tackling big issues,” White House official Dan Bartlett said, citing initiatives on energy, Social Security and national missile defense all unveiled in the last two weeks. “This president is governing by focusing on the big ideas he campaigned on.”

Indeed, Bush’s energy plan, on the heels of his budget, tax cut and education reform proposals, reflected a clear pattern in the way the 43rd president does his job.

He’s a conservative, not a centrist, although he wraps conservative programs in moderate language. The energy plan, for example, focused in substance on increasing supplies of oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear energy--but Bush’s presentation stressed his devotion to conservation.

He follows the blueprint laid out in his campaign with little if any change. The energy plan, despite months in gestation, contained few (if any) surprises. The next big steps--a Republican version of the “patients’ bill of rights,” prescription drug coverage for Medicare recipients, a proposal to privatize part of Social Security and a massive restructuring of the armed forces--all come straight from the campaign playbook.

He’s willing to compromise on details as the price of winning the larger debate. Bush aides acknowledge that they are likely to lose on their proposal to drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (no fewer than eight GOP senators already have signaled their opposition), but they left it in the report so they’d have something to give away.

He’s not above latching onto a flimsy argument for tactical advantage now and then. (Recently, he suggested that the best solution to this spring’s spike in gasoline prices was his long-term tax cut, most of which doesn’t kick in for years.)

And he governs as if he had a solid mandate from 60% of the voters, not the 48% who actually cast ballots for him.

“Of course he has to govern as if he won by a landslide,” Duberstein said. “The only way to achieve success is to govern, not hesitate. He is doing, in fact, what he promised to do in the campaign.”

Duberstein and Deaver have been asked for advice by the new White House staff, and both agreed to share some publicly.

In the next stage, Duberstein said, Bush needs to “use the Oval Office more as a bully pulpit than he has had to do in the initial 130 days. He has to take a page from Clinton and demonstrate to the American people that on the energy issue he cares--in the short term as well as in the long term.”

“You may see an awful lot from the White House on health care this autumn rather than some of these other potentially divisive issues. It demonstrates to the American people that he cares, and I think you need one of those.”

(A White House aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Bush intends to turn his attention soon to proposals for a patients’ bill of rights--measures to protect members of managed care health plans. “We think it’s closer than most people think,” he said.)

“They’ve got to work a little harder on that part,” Deaver said. “Reagan’s biggest negative in the polls was the question: ‘Does he care about people?’ That’s a traditional problem for Republican presidents.

“And energy is a hard issue to explain. There’s so much mythology about it. It takes a lot of explaining if you’re going to defend the existing delivery system.”

Still, Deaver said he believes the Bush administration has made a good start. “These guys are the best managers we’ve ever seen. They’re disciplined. They know you can’t say something just once. They know you gotta stay on message. . . . They just have to tweak it a little more.”

Another former White House aide--Leon E. Panetta, who served as Clinton’s chief of staff (and who has not been consulted by the Bush administration)--is less bullish, though.

“In terms of the style of the presidency . . . I think he’s been in sync, probably, with where most Americans feel the office ought to be,” said Panetta, who now directs a public policy institute at Cal State Monterey Bay.

“But on substance I’d give him lower marks. In the campaign, he really did want to portray an image of someone who was going to try and work at the center and build coalitions and not be a standard right-wing Republican. That was the impression most voters had of him.”

In 1993, Panetta recalled, “Clinton wanted to convey the impression that he was a new kind of Democrat, and the issue of gays in the military hurt him on that count. The environment has hurt Bush the same way; it has affected the impression of who they are.

“For all the rhetoric about conservation, as soon as he includes drilling in the Arctic and nuclear power, he has pretty much drawn the line of where he wants to go,” Panetta said. “All the words in the world are not going to change the public’s view of him as a Texan. Can you spin your way away from the substance of the report? I don’t know. I have a feeling that the American people . . . are a lot more suspicious now.”