From RFK to GWB - In 2000, echoes of 1968.

WHAT can Bobby Kennedy possibly teach George W. Bush about how to run for president? The radical-chic senator-he once praised Che Guevara as a revolutionary hero-is not, after all, the kind of politician to whom a conservative turns easily for inspiration. And yet in 1968 Kennedy did precisely what Bush is trying to do today. He made his campaign for president a campaign, in part, against the mentality of the entitlement state-and he did it in the name of compassion.

A number of elements of Bush's "compassionate conservatism" strongly resemble RFK's proposals to reform the entitlement state. Bush's plan to use the tax code to put the market to work solving the problems of the poor is reminiscent of ideas Kennedy pioneered three and a half decades ago. Commonplace though they seem today, Kennedy's proposals to use the Internal Revenue Code to bring private enterprise to the ghetto were innovative ones at the time. Bush wants to use the same sort of thinking to help poor and "working" Americans obtain private health insurance, come up with a down payment on a house, or cover the costs of college or starting a business. Like Bush, Kennedy was skeptical of government-directed efforts to fight poverty; he wanted to find ways to help inner-city residents rebuild their neighborhoods themselves. Kennedy's somewhat utopian scheme called for citizens to do the rebuilding with their own hands-a plan that foundered, in a Kennedy- sponsored test project in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, when unsympathetic unions frowned on the idea of competing with a new army of home-builders. Bush circumvents the union problem by proposing to give tax credits to private developers to build and rehabilitate houses in languishing neighborhoods.

Bush, of course, isn't the only politician in the years since Robert Kennedy's death to propose using the tax code to help the less fortunate. Al Gore has floated similar schemes, some of which have found expression in the administration's "empowerment zone" initiatives, which combine tax incentives, job training, low-interest loans, and community grants. Bill Clinton has turned tax credits for the poor into something of a growth industry-and in the process made the tax code more ludicrously complicated than ever. What sets Bush apart isn't his emphasis on tax credits, but his belief that the entitlement state, as it's currently structured, isn't all that compassionate. It nurtures, not self-confident, self-reliant citizens, but groups of servile dependents hooked on the largesse of the central government. A glance at the history books reveals that this is precisely what the entitlement state was intended to do. Compassion didn't play a role in the creation of the earliest welfare state, that which Otto von Bismarck established in Germany in the last quarter of the 19th century. Bismarck, the historian A. J. P. Taylor observed, "did not promote social reform out of love for the German workers." "Sympathy" and "affection," Taylor wrote, were never among the Iron Chancellor's "strong points." Bismarck instead established the Wohlfahrtstaat in order to make the lower orders "more subservient" to the state. The American entitlement system-which for Kennedy amounted to a cynical "payoff" that substituted "check-writing ma chines for male wage-earners"-hasn't proved to be any more compassionate.

The problem with Bush's current challenge to the entitlement system-a challenge that includes his proposal to modernize Social Security with private investment accounts-is that it lacks an underlying philosophy to hold it together. When Kennedy challenged New Deal and Great Society thinking in the 1960s, he offered an argument, not just a set of policy positions. He pointed out that the entitlement state was, in certain respects, inconsistent with older Ameri can ideas about the importance of self-reliance. He invoked the liberalism of 19th-century America-the liberalism of Emerson and Lincoln-and celebrated its faith in the power of individual effort. Real compassion, Kennedy argued, consisted in giving people the confidence they needed to make that individual effort; he saw no other way to give them a "chance to be fully self- supporting." At the same time Kennedy recognized what contemporary conservatives too often fail to grasp: that the rhetoric of self- reliance by itself long ago ceased to move Americans. Only by presenting voters with a package in which (a certain kind of) compassion is intended to nurture self- reliance and self-confidence does the older vocabulary of liberal individualism become palatable to them. Calls to reform the entitlement state made in the name of individual liberty (like those of Hayek and Friedman) no longer resonate with an electorate that has been taught to be suspicious of naked individualism. Kennedy demonstrated that only by persuading Americans that entitlement reform is what we would now call a kind of tough love-an exercise in a shrewder sort of compassion-will its advocates succeed in making needed changes.

To turn compassionate conservatism into something more than a slogan- the Republican counterpart of the vacuous rhetoric of the Clinton-Gore Third Way-Bush needs to do more than propose policies: He needs to get Americans to rethink the meaning of compassion. Much of the country today-and almost all of the media-take it for granted that a candidate's compassion can be measured by the number of federal dollars he proposes to spend on entitlement programs. A candidate who proposes to spend a lot of dollars cares; a candidate who doesn't, doesn't. If compassion continues to be defined in terms of federal largesse, Al Gore wins the "I care" contest hands down: He simply has to promise to spend more money and to protect the status quo from "risky" attempts to change it. If Bush is to succeed in changing the terms of the debate, he needs to take a page from Robert Kennedy's brief and argue that spending ever greater numbers of federal dollars won't get at the heart of the problem of poverty in America. More check-writing machines do nothing to inspire in people what Emerson called "self-trust"; they do nothing to give people the self-confidence to take back their lives and make something of them. Bush knows this. "We have found that the government can spend money," he has declared in speeches, "but it can't put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives." Too often, however, Bush is tempted in his speechmaking to play the part of George the Evangelist: His most compelling insights are lost in a fulsome, missionary-like rhetoric that won't persuade those middle-of-the-road voters who might otherwise be sympathetic to what he has to say.

If he's to best Gore on what has traditionally been Democratic ground, Bush must do more than redefine the meaning of compassion. He needs to explain why entitlement reform must be coupled with education reform, as well as reform designed to foster greater cooperation between government and faith-based programs. Here Kennedy's example can't help; the late senator didn't venture very far into either education or faith-based territory. And yet entitlement reform won't work unless schools give young people the confidence they need to succeed in a free (as opposed to a servile) society. Few institutions outside the family have a greater responsibility to exercise confidence-building compassion-to "touch the human heart," in Bush's words-than schools do. Bush needs to tell America why the education reforms he's proposing (accountability, local control, parental choice, competition, an emphasis on character-building) will help schools meet their responsibility-and prevent the creation of a new generation of dependents. As Charles Murray has pointed out, the underclass isn't shrinking, it's getting larger. Al Gore, indebted to the teachers' unions, can't fix the problem. Bush needs to do a better job of explaining why he can.

THE OLD-WASP TEXAN

It's never an easy thing to be a patrician in a democracy. (Just ask Coriolanus.) In redefining compassion to make it compatible with American ideals of self-reliance and opportunity for self-betterment, Bush would take a big step toward shedding some of the patrician baggage that burdens him. His father, George H. W. Bush, once claimed not to know what the word patrician meant; but by even the strictest of the old Roman definitions the Bushes are patricians. (There was a senator in the family.) The Bushes, of course, are patricians, not simply in the Roman sense, but in the less formal way we understand the word today: They send their sons to schools like Andover and Yale, they spend their summers in Maine, they count a large number of Protestant clergymen among their forebears. Unlike so many patrician families in politics, however, the Bushes have for a long time refused to play the role of grand seigneurs. When Bush the Elder packed up the family after graduating from Yale and drove them West to "live the dream," as he put it, he did so in order to become an entrepreneur. His oldest son's conservative compassion, like his own "thousand points of light," is, in a way, an entrepreneurial compassion; in emphasizing it, his son calls attention to all that separates his family's brand of compassion from the faintly condescending noblesse oblige that characterized those aristocrats who, like Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, identified their careers with the entitlement state.

The elder Bush's decision to turn his back on Greenwich and light out for the Territory was a smart one. The golden age of patrician dominance in American public life-a period that coincided with the building of the regulatory and administrative state under Wilson and the two Roosevelts-was slowly coming to an end when he brought Barbara and little George to Odessa, Texas, in the summer of 1948. Bobby Kennedy, an almost exact contemporary of the elder Bush, sensed as much himself. He, too, realized that noblesse no longer justified a political career; he, too, was moving to embrace a more entrepreneurial model of reform; at one point he even flirted with the idea of moving to Nevada and running for the Senate there, although in the end he never moved out West as Bush did. (Non- patricians like Johnson and Nixon, oddly enough, seem to have been less aware than either Kennedy or Bush pere that the old seigneurial thinking was doomed; they devoted themselves to expanding the welfare state at a time when more perceptive minds were contemplating retrenchment. Perhaps at some level they were afraid they would otherwise appear boorish and plebeian in comparison with the breezy liberality of men like Stevenson and FDR.) Kennedy did not, of course, believe that the entitlement state should be dismantled; in a number of areas he wanted to see its scope enlarged. But he recognized that it was-as a European (and specifically a German) import-in many ways incompatible with older American traditions and ideals. Although the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was a step in the right direction, one that Kennedy would have applauded, the business of reconciling the entitlement state with older American mores is not yet finished. In pledging to complete the job, the younger Bush would remind people that his own heritage is as much an entrepreneurial as a patrician one.

Some will snicker at the idea that Bush, the product of Kennebunkport summers and the beneficiary of his father's political and business connections, is a genuinely entrepreneurial figure. And yet his experience of life-from the time he spent in public school as a boy in Midland, Texas, to his stints in the private sector-is broader than his opponent's much more narrowly patrician existence. Gore, himself the scion of a patrician (and senatorial) family, a product of St. Alban's and Harvard and summers spent living the life of a gentleman-farmer in Carthage, Tennessee, may genuinely want to "reinvent" the federal government, as he once pledged to do. But his freedom to maneuver is limited. Gore is beholden to the old mandarin elites, to big labor and the bureaucrats, to the teachers' unions and the unrepentant Left, to those who continue to believe that progress results from Washington- directed acts of federal noblesse and shrink from reform that threatens the status quo. Gore's debt to the anti-entrepreneurial aristocracy that still dominates the Left-an aristocracy that fears the introduction of freedom, choice, and competition in areas such as education, trade, and Social Security-gives Bush the opportunity to portray himself as the real revolutionary in the race, the entrepreneurial candidate who, if elected, could make progress in fixing an entitlement system that doesn't work, an education system that doesn't educate, a bureaucrat-knows-best mentality that sees poor people as victims, not as men and women who, with a little self- confidence, could get there on their own.

ADDITIONAL PAGES FROM RFK 

A note of outrage, of righteous indignation-the kind of controlled anger of which Robert Kennedy was a master-wouldn't be altogether inappropriate in Bush's late-in-the-campaign speeches: for of course people's futures are being held hostage by interest groups like the teachers' unions. The noblesse de cloche-the petty bureaucrats and placeholders-are holding up the revolution. And Bush, like Kennedy, should be out of doors more often; his campaign should allow people to draw a connection between the largeness of the land-the vast expanse of the country-and the greatness of its opportunities. In ways that aren't entirely clear, Kennedy's ideas about entitlement reform grew out of the muscular patriotism of his early career, his visceral attachment to the American landscape, its startling beauty, the tremendous opportunities it afforded to those who were willing to work. It was a big land; a lot of hard work had made it a great land. But although Kennedy believed that only hard work-blood and sweat-could transform the nation's decaying neighborhoods, he was careful not to sound the tough-hombre theme too loudly in the middle Sixties. After his brother's death, he softened the rhetoric of muscular patriotism that had marked his early speeches. He did so for the same reason that he abandoned his military-style crew cut. He wanted to run for office himself, and he knew that many in his party were suspicious of his youthful conservatism, his ties to Joseph McCarthy, his hard-line anti- Communism. He realized that the upholders of liberal orthodoxy in his party doubted him and wondered whether he had been irredeemably corrupted by the "blood-and-soil" ideals of the anti-Communist Right. Hence Kennedy's dilemma: He had at once to appease the Left and at the same time find a way to remain true to his own robust patriotism.

He solved the problem by learning to prefer a patriotism of the image to a patriotism of the word: a sort of photo-op poetry that was in many ways more effective than the hortatory exertions of so many flag-waving stump speeches. The strength of Kennedy's attachment to the land was captured by the photographers and the television newsmen who trailed him as he traveled across the country. Their images-of Kennedy shooting the rapids in the Colorado River, making a pilgrimage to the humid lowlands of the Mississippi Delta, hiking amid the arid rocks of the western canyons, or surrounded by transfixed schoolchildren in the streets of Watts or Harlem-did more than words could to convey the qualities of the candidate's patriotism. (Ronald Reagan, in a different way, was a master of using imagery to convey the strength of his love for the land; in the news footage you would see him clearing brush in the sunlit San Bernadino hills or riding along dusty trails.) When Bush is photographed out of doors, he is usually jogging. Jogging is a yuppie's way of relating to the land, not a leader's. The value of pictures of the candidate-as-jogger is undermined by the delicate fragrance of narcissism that hangs about them: The jogger appears to be more interested in perfecting his own beauty than in coming to terms with that of the country he is passing by. The Bush campaign needs to show Americans, not a candidate who is in good shape, but a candidate who is convinced that the country itself, with all its problems, is in good shape, and remains a land big with promise and possibility.

Can Bush win with a challenge to the entitlement state undertaken in the name of a new (and entrepreneurial) brand of conservative compassion? The answer is unclear. The strategy has never been tested electorally. (At least not in a presidential election.) Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the midst of his campaign for the White House; and in any event he struggled with the Gore-like problem of trying to reconcile his desire for reform with the need to appease left-of-center interest groups in his party. Bush doesn't have that problem; he can go farther than Kennedy could in the cause of reform. But Bush's strategy is still, as Gore would say, a risky one. As any entrepreneur will tell you, you need to take risks if you want rewards.