Step by Faltering Step.

George W. keeps at it

Columbia, S.C.

GEORGE W. BUSH is standing at a lone microphone set up in front of his campaign bus, taking questions from a crowd of reporters before a town-hall meeting. Do you have any message for Democratic voters in the state? asks one scribe. W. cocks his head, looking puzzled. "You mean during the Republican primary?" In this state, W. risks again getting overwhelmed by a wave of independents and Democrats voting for John McCain, but he seems unfazed. "In the primary, um--not really," he explains. "I'm trying to rally the Republican base, conservative independents. It's hard for me to rally the Democrats to the Republican primary when I refuse to take Democratic positions on tax cuts. I've got the Republican position on the tax cuts." He then relinquishes the mike to press aide Mindy Tucker, calling her--in an Austin Powers reference--"Mindy-Me."

From off to the side, W. amuses himself as Tucker talks to reporters, leaning back toward the mike and cupping his ear, pretending to be eager to hear whatever explosive information she is about to reveal. "Mindy-Me" goes on for a couple minutes, when everyone hears a shout. It's W., saying "Excuse me!" and pointing with both arms--as if directing a plane on a runway--toward the county fairgrounds: It's time to move to the main event. So, in a matter of minutes, Bush manages to reinforce several worries about his candidacy: that he can't handle off-the-cuff questions; that his message now simply boils down to "I'm a Republican!"; and that his fun, spontaneous side smacks of arrested adolescence.

Even as Bush's radio and TV attacks begin to bite against McCain, to watch him campaign in South Carolina is to see a more effective candidacy struggling--really struggling--to be born. The night before the town-hall meeting, Bush speaks at an event honoring 71-year-old GOP congressman Floyd Spence. The emcee is former governor Carroll Campbell, now a million-dollar lobbyist, who rallies a crowd of 200 Republicans with an admonition not to let Democrats choose the GOP candidate for president. But when Spence takes the stage, he promptly talks about how Democrats helped elect him to Congress 30 years ago. When the candidate himself shows up, the message only gets more muddled. Bush brings with him California representative Duke Cunningham, whom he hails as an ace fighter pilot in Vietnam--serving only to remind people that Bush has no war record of his own. He then proceeds to lionize Spence as "Mr. Chairman"--as if unaware that his campaign is using "chairman" as a term of abuse for McCain.

At the end of his brief talk, Bush cites freedom as America's "greatest export": "freedoms of religions, freedoms of speech, freedoms of elections." Only Bush would refer to "freedom of religion" in the plural. But then, he often garbles and makes up words, as when he tells one South Carolina crowd that his education message "will resignate amongst all parents." And he steps on his own applause lines. A standard Bush line, for instance, is the ringing declaration that the rest of the world "can be the peacekeepers; America will be the peacemakers!" But he will say almost in the same breath that he wants to "keep the peace." So, which is it? Bush is also prone to statements that are utterly unidiomatic for anyone knowledgeable about politics. Only W. talks about "cutting the taxes." Only Bush refers to campaign-finance reform as "campaign-funding reform." Every time the governor looses one of these phrases, it's a signal to the ear that he doesn't quite know what he's talking about.

Which is a shame, because the new-and-improved Bush campaign has unleashed the hidden policy wonk in George W. Many of his answers to questions on the stump are substantive and involved. At a town-hall meeting in Orangeburg, Bush gets a question on health care, to which he spins out a sensible five-minute response without resorting to any of the demagogic banalities that McCain has made his staple. And on taxes, he now has a rap smoother than Steve Forbes's, but just as principled. He argues first principles: "It's not the government's money--it's your money!" He calls the surplus "by definition" money beyond the needs of government. He says a chunk of it should go back to people, as a matter of both economics (it will stimulate growth) and justice (the people earned it in the first place).

Leaving money in Washington, Bush warns, "will expand the reach and scope of the federal government." This is wrong, he says, because states and localities--and ultimately individuals--ought to be trusted with more power. But, though he makes this argument about taxes, he fails to unite it with his other proposals, most of which--from school vouchers to tort reform--involve empowering people at the expense of ineffective, grasping government and liberal special interests. Before New Hampshire, he trotted out "compassionate conservatism" as his campaign's sole rationale; he would have done well to make it only an aspect of this broader program of conservative reform.

As for Bush's latest slogan--"a reformer with results"--it is at best a hamhanded way of trying to say that John McCain has misdiagnosed what needs to be reformed and unseated in Washington. It's not the campaign-finance system and "Big Money," but the federal government and the political class. Bush tiptoes up to making the case that McCain's crusade is only a sideshow, a distraction from real reform. He points out that he didn't whine about "special interests" when he fought for and passed HMO reform in Texas. And, in Orangeburg, he finally makes a principled argument against McCain's campaign-finance reform: "We can't have a campaign-funding reform law that prohibits individuals from participating in the system. Guess what will happen otherwise? My friends in the media will get to decide who the candidates are for president, and I'm not interested in them making the decision. I want the people to decide!" This a hint of the populism Bush could turn against McCain--if his campaign were shrewder and more focused.

The problem for Bush is that "reformer with results" smacks of his earlier empty slogans. It is a revamped version of the same old argument that, as chief executive of a state, he's better suited than McCain to be president. Even with his sharper arguments on taxes and other issues, his rhetoric is a mishmash, with tacked-on bows to McCain (a campaign-finance proposal of his own, insistence on higher military pay, etc.) and the familiar riffs on compassion and the vacuous talk about his own leadership. Bush constantly says that people will elect him if they conclude "we know he's a decision-maker" and "knows how to delegate." Not exactly stirring. His innovation on the stump is that he now delivers these lines without a podium. In Orangeburg, he stands alone with a mike in front of a 50-foothigh American flag, wearing a gray suit with the jacket buttoned. As he bends at the hips making his points, holding the mike with both hands, he looks a little like Talking Heads singer David Byrne, who used to jerk back and forth on stage in oversized suits.

And will Bush ever learn to handle awkward situations more smoothly? When someone asks him whether he would issue a certain executive order, W. doesn't dodge the question cleanly, but stumbles around, conceding, "I don't understand the range and scope of executive orders." Later, when he mentions that he flew jets for the Texas National Guard, then went on to become commander in chief of the guard, he snickers and remarks "only in America"--as if his getting elected governor were a piece of American bizarro on a par with the Ginzu knife and Monica Lewinsky's contract with Jenny Craig.

Despite all this, there remains something charming about George W., and audiences react to it. Bush tells a group of friendly evangelicals in Columbia that, when it comes to appealing to minorities, a crucial question will be, "Is my heart right?" Alas, Bush's heart is not the problem.