Both races can feel the president’s reach

More than two-thirds of Americans say the country is “seriously off on the wrong track” under President Bush. Still, a remarkable thing is happening among Republican candidates for the White House: They are enthusiastically embracing Bush’s major policies and principles -- even some of the most controversial and unsuccessful ones.

Mitt Romney wants to keep the Guantanamo Bay prison open -- even expand it -- and endorses Bush’s failed plan to overhaul Social Security. Rudolph W. Giuliani, like Bush, sees tax breaks as the key to expanding health insurance coverage. Sen. John McCain of Arizona is a stalwart defender of a war that has left the nation unsettled.

All the leading GOP candidates want to continue Bush’s tax cuts. And like Bush, they all oppose a bill to expand a health insurance program for children.

The durability of the Bush agenda -- with its commitment to tax cuts, the Iraq war, and free-market solutions to healthcare and retirement -- is in part a tribute to the president’s continued popularity among the Republican voters who matter most now, as the candidates head into the post-Labor Day sprint to the first primaries.

But it is a politically risky agenda, especially in the general election, when the nominee must seek support from independent voters. The electorate is hungering for a change of course. Only 27% of Republicans surveyed in a June Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg News poll said they would want a nominee to campaign on continuing Bush’s policies.

“No one wants to run saying, ‘Stay the course,’ ” said former Rep. Vin Weber (R-Minn.), who is supporting Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. But for now, Weber sees candidates distinguishing themselves from Bush more in their leadership style than by offering a bold new agenda.

That has made the GOP race far different than the campaign Bush waged in 2000, when he vowed to lead his party in a new direction. He called for a more inclusive “compassionate conservatism” to replace the confrontational style that dominated after Republicans won control of Congress in 1994.

Some Republicans say the dearth of big new ideas in the 2008 campaign has prompted a lack of enthusiasm for the contenders. The race remains remarkably fluid as the candidates emerge from Labor Day weekend, the traditional starting mark for intense campaigning leading up to the primaries.

Former New York Mayor Giuliani has maintained his lead in national polls over the summer, and Romney appears to have widened his lead in key early voting states Iowa and New Hampshire. McCain is in a far weaker position than most would have guessed a year ago.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, who plans to announce his candidacy this week, has said he wants to take on big issues, such as slowing the growth of government entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia has said he may enter the race if none of the GOP candidates offers a clear vision for change. So far he does not much like what he hears.

“They are running to be president and not running to change the country,” said Gingrich aide Rick Tyler.

To be sure, some in the back of the pack have been bolder in challenging the Bush legacy. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas is an outspoken opponent of the Iraq war, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee would replace the federal income tax with a consumption tax. But among the candidates most likely to win the nomination, few seem inclined to take the party in a new direction on major issues.

“I don’t think you need to rethink principles and policies; you just need to rethink how you do it,” said Anthony V. Carbonetti, a top advisor to Giuliani. “I don’t believe people want to change the goal of winning the war on terror. They just want better results.”

“They all walk a fine line,” said GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio. “If one of them stood up and said, ‘I’m going to lead this party in a new direction,’ they would be out of the mainstream of the party.”

In a recent debate in Iowa, Romney dramatized the cross-pressures facing GOP candidates as they run in Bush’s shadow. Pressed on whether he agreed with Bush on an aspect of foreign policy, Romney kept him at arm’s length: “I’m not a carbon copy of President Bush.”

But later in the debate, he paid tribute to a president who retains the support of most Republicans: “It’s been very popular lately for people across the country to be critical of the president and the vice president. . . . But they have kept us safe these past six years, so let’s not forget that.”

Where the candidates have distinguished themselves from Bush, it has usually been with an eye to the party’s conservative base. Romney and Giuliani, in recent ads and speeches, have seemed to be competing to be the toughest on illegal immigrants, setting a tone harsher than Bush’s.

The most delicate calculation for Republicans has been over Bush’s Iraq war policy, which polls show is losing support among GOP voters, even while those voters oppose a troop pullout. All the leading GOP candidates support this year’s troop increase and oppose efforts to set a deadline for withdrawal. But they also have criticized the way the war was prosecuted.

There is less ambivalence in the candidates’ embrace of Bush’s legacy in tax policy. All support making permanent his tax cuts due to expire after 2010.

But the tax issue, though still a GOP mainstay, may not be considered urgent by all voters. In a poll released Thursday by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 7% of respondents cited taxes as one of the top two issues they wanted presidential candidates to talk about, whereas 38% cited Iraq and 30% healthcare. (The foundation is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

In talking about healthcare, GOP candidates have been in sync with Bush’s approach of using tax incentives to help more Americans obtain health insurance, rather than expanding government coverage programs.

Giuliani has proposed giving some families a $15,000 tax break to buy health insurance -- a market-based alternative to the government mandates and employer-provided policies often featured in Democratic plans. Romney, who as governor signed a law requiring individuals to get coverage, has backed away from that idea and now proposes tax breaks for individuals to buy private insurance.

That pleases conservatives, who shy away from expanding the government role in healthcare. But it may not satisfy Democratic and independent voters who will be crucial to the general election.

The Kaiser poll found that 54% of those surveyed -- including 67% of Democrats and 54% of independents -- wanted candidates to propose a healthcare plan covering “nearly all of the uninsured,” even if it involved a substantial increase in spending.

Still, many Republicans are betting that their party does not need a new direction to win in 2008. They believe it will be enough for their candidates to demonstrate more competence than the Bush administration seemed to in handling the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina and in controlling government spending.

Giuliani has been touting his record as a can-do mayor who turned around New York City; Romney points to his business background in the same spirit; McCain offers his Senate record of fighting wasteful spending.

But some warn that GOP candidates risk defeat if they are simply a “me-too” chorus for the Bush agenda.

“The party is going to have to remake itself, but it’s not there yet,” said Thomas E. Mann, a political analyst at the centrist Brookings Institution think tank. “It will have to suffer another electoral defeat or two before they surface people pressing ideas other than those advanced during the Bush presidency.”

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janet.hook@latimes.com