Loyal to the Core, Bush Knows How to Play to the Crucial Outsiders

If President Bush’s approval rating stays in the stratosphere, he will probably coast to reelection in 2004. Every incumbent president with approval ratings even approaching his 70%-plus has won a second term without breaking a sweat. You can look it up.

But political strategists, like generals, are paid to anticipate worst-case scenarios. And hints of how Bush would hope to win a close election are surfacing. These clues are contained in the pattern of Bush’s decisions over his first 16 months, particularly where he’s broken from his conservative base. On the biggest questions, like taxes or energy, Bush has almost always sided with his core conservative supporters. But on secondary issues, he’s shown himself willing to abandon conservative orthodoxy to appeal to precisely targeted groups, like steelworkers or farmers.

This isn’t the behavior of a president trying to fundamentally realign the electorate by inspiring wholesale changes in the allegiance of swing voters. To do that, Bush would have to risk angering his core supporters by moving to the center on big issues, something he’s done only rarely.

Instead, after the closest presidential election in more than a century, Bush’s camp is placing a different bet. Their underlying assumption seems to be that, if Bush holds his base from 2000, he’ll be close enough to a majority that he won’t need to convert large groups of those who resisted him last time. All he might need is to tip small numbers of voters in key places, like steelworkers in the industrial belt. “The goal ultimately has to be to hold what you start with and then change the dynamics of 4% or 5%, total,” one senior Bush political advisor says. “It’s not like you’re trying to build to 60% of the vote, but rather to build to 52%.”

Seen from that angle, Bush’s principal policy decisions over his first 16 months sort into three broad categories.

The largest group are actions that appeal to his conservative base. Almost all of Bush’s front-page decisions fall into this column.

On energy, taxes, judicial nominations, guns, the environment, defense spending, resistance to international treaties, opposition to human cloning for research, the partial privatization of Social Security--in short, on almost all of the major issues he’s faced--Bush has sided with conservatives, even at the risk of alienating moderates.

This approach has quickly advanced the first part of his strategy: holding his vote from 2000. Even before Sept. 11, Bush had consolidated his base as effectively as any incoming president in memory, with an approval rating among Republicans that consistently levitated above 90%. Before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, though, this success carried a price: a sharply polarized electorate and unusually high disapproval ratings among Democrats.

The second category of decisions has involved issues on which he has tried to find a “third way” that attracts moderates without alienating conservatives. Politically, these “compassionate conservative” issues are intended to soften the sharp edges of his decisions in the first category. Bush has made some progress, particularly on education, but none of the other ideas on this list--like promoting faith-based charities--has proved central to his presidency. As a result, if his post-Sept. 11 glow appreciatively fades, these ideas are unlikely to convert too many voters who are uncomfortable with his posture on the bigger priorities.

Which increases the importance of an emerging third group of issues in broadening Bush’s support. These are what might be called Bush’s targeted heresies: the issues on which he courts distinct groups of voters outside his coalition through positions that collide with his conservative base--and often his own general principles as well.

Bush put one issue in this basket last year when he reached out to Latinos and defied the military by agreeing to end Navy artillery testing on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. More recently, he outraged free traders but thrilled steelworkers by imposing punishing tariffs on steel imports. Then, this month, he signed a farm bill popular with rural communities but so expensive that most Senate Republicans voted against it. Immigration reform, which intrigues Latinos and infuriates conservatives, would fall into this category too, if Bush ever moves forward on it.

This is micro, not macro, politics. Immigration aside, none of these issues stirs great national passion. But they matter deeply to discrete groups in specific places. The farm bill will help Bush in Midwestern states he narrowly lost last time--and which also could determine Senate control next year. Bush’s deal for steel could lift him in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Latino votes will be critical in Florida and the Southwest.

This precise attention to the needs of narrow constituencies adapts to the national level a distinctive style of local politics. “It’s ward politics in many ways,” says Marshall Wittmann, a political analyst at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington. “He can dole out goodies to various constituencies while not defying the base of the party on the big questions.” The old ward bosses who passed out turkeys at Christmas would understand Bush’s favors for steelworkers or farmers: He is appealing to interests, not ideals or ideology.

For Bush, the harmonic convergence comes on policies that allow him to solidify his base while courting key targets beyond it. By supporting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, Bush built common cause with Teamsters while pleasing energy companies; his opposition to higher fuel economy standards cheered the auto industry while opening doors to the United Auto Workers. Likewise, Bush’s staunch support of Israel satisfies conservative demands while creating opportunities with traditionally Democratic Jews.

None of this guarantees Bush reelection. But it does suggest his advisors aren’t banking only on the post-Sept. 11 wave to carry him to a second term. If the wave stays high, he won’t need any help. But Bush is working to ensure that, if the wave recedes, he’ll still have more ground under his control--a steelworkers’ union hall here, a farm town there--than he did in 2000.

The danger for Bush is that too many decisions obviously aimed at expanding his turf could threaten his hold on higher ground: his image of putting principle above politics.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/brownstein.