Campaign fever.

IS JIM BAKER coming or staying? It depends on whom you ask. As NATIONAL REVIEW goes to press, the papers have all reported his shift to the campaign team as a fait accompli, to take place after the visit here by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in August. But George Bush hasn't confirmed it, and he walked into a meeting of senior staff to tell them two things: 1) they were going to win in November; 2) he had made no decision on Baker yet. He added that if the secretary of state were moving over to the campaign he thinks he, the President, would know about it.

Well, maybe not. It is but a measure of the disarray in the campaign that no one, including the President, seems to know what is happening. It certainly looks as if Baker is coming--after all, Bush has been out at Bakers ranch in Wyoming and Baker is doing nothing to discourage the rumors. Then again, it serves no purpose for Bush to mislead his senior staff.

The will-he-won't-he suspense surrounding Jim Baker is only the latest and most visible sign of a campaign running off the tracks. Conservatives have long complained that the Bush campaign is in trouble. George Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan, does not stand for anything, because he stands for everything; he has changed his position on everything from quotas and taxes to education and the environment. But the campaign also suffers from a lack of the C-word: competence. Everywhere you turn Republicans offer campaign horror stories: senators and congressmen who don't know Bush is visiting their state and can't get information confirmed or denied; lack of co-ordination with state Republican organizations; and, above all, lots of decisions that go back and forth without ever being resolved.

Take Vin Weber. Rightly touted as one of the brightest young conservative stars, the Minnesota Republican has been courted by campaign brass to serve as co-chairman. Although he has been highly critical of individual Bush moves in the past--Weber helped lead the House rebellion against the 1990 tax-raising budget deal--he has also supported him on the few issues where Bush has been strong, principally abortion. Not only would Weber provide some policy heft to a campaign trying to prove its President stands for something, he also brings a nuts-and-bolts knowledge of campaign tactics. In 1978, Weber ran the successful senatorial campaign of Rudy Boschwitz, taking a seat that had been held by Democrats for more than two decades.

Thus Weber was invited to dinner with campaign chairman Bob Teeter and political director Mary Matalin. This was followed by a meeting in Teeter's office, a meeting with Chairman Rich Bond at the Republican National Committee, and a meeting with campaign manager Fred Malek. Evans & Novak reported Weber's new position on a Wednesday. But that same afternoon at the Heritage Foundation, in response to questions about when he would start and what he would be doing, Weber answered bluntly, "I don't know .... it's still ill-defined."

"That's so typical of the campaign," says one staffer. "Everyone agrees we need him on, there's no real objection, and yet nothing ever seems to get pushed to a conclusion. We're always putting out fires that never should have started."

Now, even the best of campaigns has some constant level of chaos, but the lack of follow-through in the case of Bush-Quayle '92 is exacerbated by the lack of philosophical direction. Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin will be delivering the nominating speech, a sop to "year of the woman" fever. Former drug czar William Bennett doesn't yet know what he'll be doing, though there's talk of a platform press conference. Jack Kemp hadn't even booked rooms for the convention until the campaign finally figured out they might need him.

The rise of the Dump Quayle movement is the perfect example of misdirection and missed opportunities by the Bush campaign. Although campaign and Quayle staffers absolutely deny the rumor that Bush would replace Quayle, it's no secret why the rumors are plausible: the Washington Post/ABC poll showing that 60 per cent favor getting rid of Quayle, as well as polls showing that his high negatives are mirrored by Al Gore's high positives. Even some conservatives are impressed [see "Dropping the Co-Pilot," page 14]. But polls are tricky things, and the moment Bush tossed Quayle overboard the liberals in the press who have been urging him to do so would attack him for cynicism. "I don't care if his approval ratings are down to 1 per cent, the Vice President has done a good job and should stay on the ticket," says Weber. "There is nothing that suggests that if they get rid of Dan Quayle it will solve the problems George Bush has or bring him up even one-half of 1 per cent."

Bennett takes it even further, seeing in the Dump Quayle frenzy a golden opportunity for Bush to' prove his principles by standing up for his second. "Polls respond to leadership," says Bennett. "If the President were to go out publicly and forcefully tell the nation that there was no way he was going to give in to pressure to get rid of his running-mate, both his and Quayle's ratings would go up."

Unfortunately, the evidence thus far is that Bush is going to get the worst of both worlds. To be sure, he did characterize the rumors about dumping Quayle as "absurd" and told reporters at a Cabinet meeting that his Vice President's position on the ticket was "very certain." At the same time, however, people have been leaking all over Washington that Quayle is going to go, and when White House counselor Clayton Yeutter told a TV reporter that he was "99.99 per cent certain" that Quayle would remain, he left open the door of doubt. Bush's reluctance to squelch the rumor completely not only weakens the ticket by allowing speculation to continue, it means he won't get credit for standing by his Vice President because it looks as if he has done so reluctantly.

Weber argues that talk about replacing Quayle is a "distraction," and most of his GOP colleagues on the Hill agree. "Up here both senators and representatives are telling the campaign that the President has no credibility out in the country, that he's got to fire Darman and Brady if he's going to get some, that no one believes any of his promises," says one Senate staffer. "And this is not coming from just the conservatives--it's coming from generally polite Republicans."

Nor does the criticism stop with personnel matters. In terms of policy, conservatives are urging Bush, for example, to enforce the Supreme Court's Beck decision, which allows union members to have refunded to them that portion of their dues used for political purposes. All that is required is for Bush to have the Labor Department order unions to divide political from non-political moneys in their accounting, so as to facilitate the refunds. But Lynn Martin fails to carry it through and is still rewarded with a prime-time convention address. In another snafu that made the papers, the RNC sent an invitation to a Quayle breakfast to the largest gay-rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign Fund. Although the invitation was, as RNC Chairman Bond explained, a simple mistake (no one checked the mailing list), it's a mistake the White House can ill afford after Bush's trouble with evangelicals for inviting homosexual activists to the White House for a bill-signing.

This is the kind of mistake that Baker's oversight would prevent, and even conservatives who dislike the secretary of state's foreign policy concede that he would bring some badly needed professionalism to a sloppy campaign. The problem is that professionalism is only half the campaign's problem--and not even the most important half.

"What they need is a thorough house-cleaning," says one senior Administration figure. "But they also need to restore the President's credibility with the public, and they can do that only by getting rid of Darman and Brady, fighting for a Weber-Kasten pro-growth tax-cutting plan, and taking on Congress on matters of substance. If Baker's really as smart as he thinks, this will be obvious. If he's not, we'll lose."

Mr. McGurn is NR's Washington bureau Chief.