President W.: A success guide.

DANIEL CASSE:

Is it possible to be a good president in lousy economic times? That might be the biggest question the new Bush presidency faces. Ford, Carter, and Bush pere are hardly encouraging precedents.

The exception-as usual-is Reagan. His behavior during the first two years of his presidency ought to be George W.'s guide if the economy goes flat.

When Reagan took office, the American economy was still choking on the fumes of the Carter years. In some respects, it got worse: Inflation was tamed, but unemployment soared, entitlements grew, and the stock market tanked. Unfazed, Reagan kept up his steady drumbeat for smaller government, lower taxes, and a massive defense budget.

This drove the voices of "responsible government"-the Washington Post, David Stockman, the Brookings Institution-crazy. They insisted that Reagan abandon his reckless ideas and cooperate with Congress. Sometimes they succeeded: He caved and signed a tax increase in 1982. But the instructive point is that Reagan never went around boasting about this compromise. Instead, he took the more manly, presidential approach: He pretended it never happened and went right on talking about the things he cared about.

On Social Security accounts, tax cuts, school vouchers, and military spending, the voices of responsible government-the Washington Post, Paul Krugman, the Concord Coalition-will lecture Bush about the necessity of compromise. Sometimes they may be right. But the key to his long-term success is not to make that necessity a virtue. He ought to harp on his boldest proposals, even as they remain far out of reach.

The congressional Republicans got creamed in 1982, as they surely will in 2002. But when the dust settled, Reagan's "reckless ideas" were still very much alive. If Bush stubbornly promotes his agenda, rather than his good-natured deal-making, the best ideas from his campaign might survive our economic doldrums.

-Mr. Casse is a senior director of The White House

Writers Group, a public-policy communications firm.

KELLYANNE FITZPATRICK:

Move quickly and decisively in the first 100 days, to:

Undo Clinton's vetoes of the repeal of the death tax and the marriage- penalty tax.

Expand SDI, IRAs, MSAs, NAFTA, and other freedom-friendly acronyms.

Give all workers a refund (formerly called a "tax cut").

It's payback time for the key groups whose extremism helped elect you: labor unions (reinstate the Beck decision and repeal Davis-Bacon), trial lawyers (enact tort reform), feminists (ban partial-birth abortions and expand tax credits for adoption).

Beware that "bipartisanship" means "Kumbaya" in some languages.

Take on an issue that galvanizes the nation and invites agreement on Capitol Hill, e.g., curing cancer or Alzheimer's.

End the Justice Department's lawsuits against Microsoft.

Allow people to smoke in your office.

Never utter the words "Clinton" or "Gore"-unless you are on Letterman or Leno.

Before appointing a Democrat, ask if he or she voted for you.

Keep your promises.

Appoint Al Gore ambassador to Chad.

-Kellyanne Fitzpatrick is a Washington pollster.

STEVE FORBES:

President bush should move fast and be bold. Exciting, purposeful leadership would be the best possible antidote to the Democrat-induced post-Election Day rancor. With the economy faltering, a coherent, take- charge approach would be welcome indeed. The new president should propose major cuts in income-tax and capital-gains rates. Broad support already exists for phasing out the death tax, easing the marriage penalty, liberalizing Roth IRAs, eliminating the telephone excise tax, extending the moratorium on targeted Internet taxes, and improving depreciation allowances for small businesses.

Bush and his Treasury secretary should also pressure Alan Greenspan to ease the Federal Reserve's overly tight monetary policy, a major reason the economy is stalling. To prepare the ground for future reforms, the president should also try to enlist outgoing senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bob Kerrey to head a commission on Social Security, Sen. John Breaux to head a similar panel on Medicare reform, and former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young, who believes in school choice, to chair an education-reform group.

President Bush should also ask for and immediately sign a ban on partial-birth abortions, and move to implement a missile-defense shield by upgrading the Navy's Aegis missile system.

-Mr. Forbes is editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine.

JEFFREY HART:

On Social Security, Gov. Bush has proposed a limited personal investment of payroll taxes in selected stocks; I think he should consider some other reform models that are available and working. College professors have a plan called TIAA-CREF, a pension fund to which they contribute a monthly portion of their salary. TIAA-CREF invests the money and provides retirement income, with much more impressive returns than Social Security. Bush should also look at the Chilean model, which gives workers the opportunity to choose among three competing investment corporations. Both TIAA-CREF and the Chilean model seem to me more ambitious and desirable than the Bush proposal.

In foreign affairs, Bush should immediately announce withdrawal from the obsolete ABM treaty, and go ahead with the very limited Alaska missile-defense installation. Much more important, he should move forward on building a fleet of Aegis-class destroyers that can patrol the seas and detect missiles as they leave their launch pads; a missile can be destroyed more easily in the early stage of its flight.

Finally, deterrence remains valuable. Bush should quietly inform Iran, Iraq, and other malefactors that if they employ weapons of mass destruction against us, they will-infallibly-be annihilated.

-Mr. Hart is an NR senior editor.

JEANE KIRKPATRICK:

Some priorities: Like our new president, I choose education first, in part because I know that other opportunities follow after. Providing all young Americans the fundamental skills-reading, writing, speaking, a good knowledge of our country's history, basic values-should be the first goal. Important for all, education is especially important for immigrants, whom we must not only educate, but make Americans.

My second priority is to provide for the common defense with an effective national missile defense, to protect our borders and our population from the various dictators who have managed to steal, beg, and buy weapons of mass destruction that can reach our shores. We also need theater missile defenses that can protect our forces and those of our allies deployed to diverse places. We need as well to upgrade our armed forces, to pay them better, and appreciate them more.

We need to assure the bases of our strength: a strong, growing, viable economy; energy policies that promote production and growth, fueling our nation's industries without making us hostage to foreign dictators. We need policymakers who will not sacrifice our need for heat and transportation to environmental extremism and theories of global warming that deprive Americans of needed resources at reasonable prices.

We need realistic policies and policymakers who will preserve peace and protect our capacity for self-government, and who will not submit Americans to international courts and to laws to which they have never consented.

It would be wonderful as well to eliminate dread diseases, cure disabilities, produce plentiful supplies of medicines, and spread democratic institutions around the world. We can work on it.

-Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former ambassador to the United Nations, is a scholar, teacher, and writer.

LAWRENCE KUDLOW:

Growth, growth, growth. As the stock market sinks and the economy slows, W. can build a strong mandate to govern-and a high approval rating-with the unifying bipartisan theme of restoring economic growth and prosperity. Right from the start, in his inaugural speech, Bush should lay out an economic-recovery program whose centerpiece is lower marginal tax rates, retroactive to January 1, 2001, to spur the sluggish economy and revitalize the sagging spirits of entrepreneurship.

W. should not listen to the ignorant media pundits and other knuckleheads who favor massive budget surpluses created by huge personal tax overpayments. The taxes are dragging down the economy, so W. should expand his tax-cut plan into a full-scale reform of the tax system-reducing personal brackets to 10 and 20 percent; eliminating the capital-gains, estate, and corporate taxes; and transforming Social Security into a privately owned defined-contribution plan.

Also, W. should appoint people to the Federal Reserve who favor a stable-dollar price rule, not rising unemployment; and all regulatory disciples of Joel Klein and David Boies should be fired.

-Mr. Kudlow is an NR contributing editor.

JAY NORDLINGER:

Stick to your agenda: tax reform, Social Security reform, Medicare reform, tort reform, education reform, military reform. Stick to it unswervingly. Do exactly what you said you would do, in the long months of the campaign. Your stated agenda is your lodestar. Follow it, and you'll be great. Stray from it, and you'll find trouble. Especially: Continue to be brave on Social Security reform. This is vital for the nation; it will transform us in wonderful ways. It could be what you're remembered for. And build missile defense-this, too, is vital, and something to be remembered for.

A final thing: Not that you're vulnerable to this, but don't try to make "them"-the liberal elites-like you. They won't. And if they do, it means you'll have pulled a Souter-don't want that. To heck with the elite media, and all the other fancy people. They hated Reagan ferociously. And now the world appreciates and loves him. You're a master at being yourself-no time to stop now.

-Mr. Nordlinger is NR's managing editor. For the last month and a half of the general election, he was on leave from the magazine to work on Gov. Bush's staff.

GROVER NORQUIST:

One key reason the Democrats came close to winning this election is that the party benefited from hundreds of millions of dollars of coerced-and unreported-labor-union dues. But the Supreme Court ruled in its 1989 Beck decision that labor unions could not legally spend their members' dues on anything other than negotiating and maintaining labor contracts, unless they got advance, annual written permission from union members.

President Bush signed an executive order in 1992 to begin to enforce this decision; Clinton repealed it. Gov. Bush has promised to reinstitute that executive order; he should do so. He should also make sure that all appointees to the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board support workers' rights under Beck.

The president should also announce that for three months any American who came forward to the FBI and signed an affidavit confessing to voter fraud-college students voting at home and at school, felons voting, etc.-would receive a full pardon; voter fraud uncovered afterwards would be prosecuted. This measure would expose the true extent of Democratic voter fraud-and create momentum for reform.

-Mr. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform.

KATE O'BEIRNE:

House majority whip Tom DeLay is your most valuable asset in Congress. This opinion isn't confined to admirers of the courageous conservative stalwart; his importance to the success of your legislative agenda is recognized across the ideological spectrum. The New York Times is so eager to head off a productive relationship between you and the most effective whip in memory that it recently attacked him on its op-ed page three times in one week. The columnists-of-record wonder how a nice compassionate-conservative guy like you could keep company with such a "vicious" and "mean-spirited" partisan. Their writings are intended to scare you off. If you were to plead irreconcilable differences with DeLay, you would be divorced from your conservative base-which would delight the press.

President-elect Bush, the repeated attacks on DeLay are a tribute to his remarkable success in building a winning team with the slimmest GOP majority. He has earned his colleagues' confidence, and the conservative movement's trust and gratitude. Call on him early and often, and you'll learn what his critics know and fear: DeLay delivers.

-Kate O'Beirne is NR's Washington editor.

JOHN PODHORETZ:

Gov. bush has already hinted that he would, as president, try to isolate the most popular chunks of his platform, like estate-tax repeal, and get them through Congress quickly. That's canny politics, but since these successes are expected, they will be discounted. So his best hope in his first year is not in domestic policy, but in foreign affairs, where-with bold and visionary action-he can quickly alter his image as a lightweight.

He should propose the expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement to Chile-reminding Americans of the Republican party's economic internationalism. Turning toward Europe, he should advocate the expansion of NATO into Slovenia and Romania-thus embracing the robust political internationalism and commitment to democracy that helped make the Reagan presidency such a success. Continuing the democracy theme, he should abandon the Clinton administration's fetish of "evenhandedness" in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and side firmly with our democratic ally in the Middle East-precisely because it is our democratic ally, and therefore more worthy of American support than Arafat's dictatorship by terror. These initiatives will allow Bush to rise above the Washington fray and take his place as a world leader.

-Mr. Podhoretz, a former Reagan speechwriter, is a columnist for the New York Post.

RUSS SMITH:

Bush will enter office as the most underestimated president of modern times: This is a political reality he can use to his advantage. In his inaugural speech, he should pull a JFK and include a "man on the moon"- style uplifting goal. During his first year, he must be audacious. A purchase of part of Russia would fit the bill, perhaps a portion of Siberia; the country would applaud a Jeffersonian move like that. Billy Dale should be given an honorary ambassadorship. Immediate tax relief is a must, given the probable recession; if Democrats balk, they must be demonized. Finally, it's essential that Bush's attorney general take care of all unfinished business concerning the Clinton/Gore administration's illegal activities. No mercy; prosecute not out of vengeance, but because it's necessary that Americans realize that justice is being restored to the country. Quick action to overturn the Microsoft travesty would also be a pointed signal that Bush plans to be an activist president.

-Mr. Smith writes the "Mugger" column for his New York Press.

PAUL WEYRICH:

I know you wish to unite the country and not divide it, and I know you will do your best to reach across the aisle to work with Democrats. But you must also realize that there is an element that is out to destroy you and your party. The Clinton-Gore administration was the most corrupt in American history: They found new ways to subvert the law and undermine the Constitution. I know you would prefer to just put aside what happened these past eight years, but for the sake of your own survival and the country's, you can't do that.

Your attorney general needs to be dedicated to punishing those responsible for the corruption. You can initiate a new investigation every other week. This will keep many of your opponents off balance. Many of these radicals have big plans to render a Bush administration totally ineffective; you can turn the tables, and do the nation a great service, by sending them to prison where they belong. This is no contradiction to compassionate conservatism; it's compassionate to law- abiding people who have watched their nation's laws being systematically shredded by these outlaws.

-Mr. Weyrich is president of the Free Congress Foundation.