Can this administration be saved?

TUMBLING OFF a disappointing election and a humiliating budget deal, the Bush Administration must somehow find its bearings. How to find them is the subject of an intense debate within the White House.

On the one hand is a coterie of junior-level aides calling itself the perestroika group." James Pinkerton is a spokesman, Jack Kemp a Cabinet-level ally. The perestroika group wants a "new paradigm" for race and poverty issues, based on "empowerment." Its members also favor a campaign for economic growth focused on a capital-gains tax cut. Budget Director Richard Darman, meanwhile, dismisses all such talk as a "faddish" quest for "new ideas." Darman's ideal of politics is a twilight struggle of experts and wheeler-dealers over hot buttons like "program design" and "resource allocation."

Darman should consider that people turn to new ideas only when old ideas, such as Darman's budget deal, fail. "Empowerment" is an attempt to approach race and poverty through policies-school choice, the sale of public housing to tenants-that will benefit blacks and the poor, and that will get the GOP out of the fruitless spending contests with Democrats that it always loses. A similar paradigm shift on taxes helped give us eight years of Ronald Reagan and four of George Bush, or didn't Darman notice?

The questions joined in the paradigm debate are real, and it will be interesting to see, from the degree to which the State of the Union address tilts one way or the other, who "wins." But the battle of the aides should not obscure an essential fact of presidential leadership, which is that Presidents ultimately have the kind of Administration they want.

Throughout his political career, George Bush has never had a burning interest in domestic policy. He resisted the last Republican paradigm shift-on taxes-and not coincidentally, lost the 1980 Republican nomination. For a few years, it seemed as if Bush, chastened by experience, had become at least interested in new political thinking, if not himself a generator of it. Chief of Staff John Sununu looked to be an honest broker who would give conservatives a fair hearing.

Then came the retreat on taxes, and the long disaster of the budget. The question arises, Is Bush reverting to type? Richard Nixon once told Theodore White that the country "could run itself domestically without a President." Bush seems to be governing on that model. If the Administration stays its present course, which is no course at all, it will not be because the Machiavellian Darman has seized power, but because the President prefers to let polls and power-brokers generate policy at home, while he visits troops in distant climes.