The B team.

FOR THIS Lent I resolve not to write about the apparently inexhaustible capacity for folly of the George Bush re-election effort. Not because doing so would be unfair or un-Christian, mind you. But because, given the provocations, I regard abstaining from comment as a suitably testing penance.

Fortunately, the Lord scheduled a late Easter this year, which means that New Hampshire and the immediate aftermath are not covered by my vow. Although Pat Buchanan's ultimate tally turned out to be well under the 40 per cent originally reported, he clearly emerged the victor. Over the course of the following week Bushies from all parts of the campaign machine took pains to get the message across on the tube, over radio, and in print that the President had in fact come in first. But the pains taken only underscored the point: any time you have to explain a victory, you've lost.

This problem will not go away soon, because it is both a result of and a reaction to a schizophrenic Bush campaign. On the one hand there are people working hard to get Bush elected to a second term. Less obvious are those who would like Bush elected to a second term but are more interested in defending the first one. Candidate Bush speaks to both sides of this campaign, conceding that "I understand the message of dissatisfaction" but then asserting that "This President has done a good job." It has not yet dawned on him that these are mutually exclusive propositions, and not least among the reasons for the public's anger is that he appears so little concerned about the gap between his rhetoric and his performance. With Budget Director Richard Darman still in place killing off any real economic reform and campaign chairman Bob Teeter heading a team that doesn't think such reform necessary to re-election, we have an Administration that still does not know how to respond to Buchanan because it doesn't know what hit it.

"What you run into around here is anger and befuddlement," says one senior Administration official. "All these people are asking themselves, 'Why is Buchanan doing this?" You want to explain to them, 'He's doing it because he wants to rid the Republican Party of the whole lot of you.'"

This distance between the Bushies and the GOP rank-and-file is illustrated by the different kinds of money coming into the Bush and Buchanan campaigns. In November and December, a fundraising letter mailed to the known donor list from the three committees (the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee) actually lost money, unprecedented with a sitting GOP President and certainly in sharp contrast to the fundraising efforts for Ronald Reagan's re-election. By contrast, while upstart Pat Buchanan has not been able to raise nearly the same amount of money Bush has, he has raised it more economically and is pulling in more of the small contributors, meaning that he has a popular base (good for getting volunteers) while Bush depends on fat cats. Indeed, of the $14.3 million Bush has raised, only $2.6 million has been matched by the FEC, because matching funds are limited to contributions under $250.

The choice of people assigned to returning Bush to the White House does nothing to bridge that gap. The B Team is led by a troika that includes former Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher (now general chairman of the campaign), Fred Malek (campaign manager), and pollster Teeter (campaign chairman and chief political strategist). These in turn are supported by a second tier that includes politican director Mary Matalin, an Atwater protegee and former chief of staff at the Republican National Committee, and consultant Charles Black and RNC chief Rich Bond, both senior advisors. Whatever strengths the team may have, its only concession to the thought that campaigns may be about ideas in the inclusion of James Pinkerton, author of the "new paradigm," over at the 15th Street headquarters. In other words, these are the same folks who brought us the Dick Thornburgh disaster, blowing the biggest lead of any candidate in history.

In their own ways most of these people are extremely competent. Mosbacher can raise loads of money from fat-cat Republicans like himself. Malek is a businessman whom everyone likes. Teeter, who excites almost as much distrust as Darman, is, excluding his politican advice, a savvy pollster. Rich Bond is probably the best politican operative in the business, and even Mary Matalin, of whom conservatives are strongly suspicious on the social issues, also is a good operative.

Like their boss, however, these campaigners are all deficient in "the vision thing." Over the last two months, they have been making that painfully evident. To Bob Mosbacher's credit, he at least seemed to realize it, lamenting at one point Lee Atwater's absence and suggesting that Bush needs to get in touch with some real people. Certainly his wife, Georgette, hasn't helped in this department. The Washington Post gossip column reported a conversation with Mrs. Mosbacher at the Jockey Club, where understanding friends lamented that she had been reduced to driving around in an American-made Jeep Cherokee. "Oh I know," she is quoted as saying. "I can't wait until this campaign is over so I can say, 'Bob, open the garage and get out the Maserati. Open the safe and get out the jewels.'"

Ditto with Fred Malek. About the first thing that came out after he was named to the campaign was the number of large donations he has made to prominent Democrats (Dianne Feinstein in California, Tim Wirth in Colorado, Frank Lautenberg in New Jersey). Most people say they like Malek, but they also describe him as a fish out of water. One of the first things he said after being named by Bush was that he didn't really know anything about politics, and no one has contradicted him. As for poor Charles Black, he is thought of as the man who can keep the Right quiet by people who never understand why it's making noise.

But the guiding light of the campaign is Bob Teeter. Now, candidates need pollsters as much as armies need cooks, but you don't see many cooks who make it to general. No doubt about Teeter's brains--a Nexis search tells me that the reporters' favorite adjective is "encyclopedic"--but he does rather confirm the old Philosophy 101 distinction between knowledge and wisdom. As top pollster for Bush, Teeter was quite right in telling him early on in his Presidency that most of those who voted for him didn't really believe he'd keep his "no new taxes" pledge. But from this he concluded that Bush should confirm these uneasy suspicions by breaking it. "A lot of conservatives believe that Teeter is really a liberal," says a Republican campaign committee member who has worked closely with him. "But that gives him too much credit for having an agenda. To Bob Teeter it's all a debate between Fab and Tide."

Right now official thinking is that an attack on Pat Buchanan will do the trick. But this again implies a gross misreading of the problem. Buchanan represents a protest vote, and attacking him, as former NRCC chief Ed Rollins says, won't make the protest go away. Instead, what Bush needs to do is steal Buchanan's issues back from him, and the place to do that is not on the campaign trail but in Washington itself. So long as the Administration thinks the problem is communication rather than credibility, it will be doomed to miscalculation. Bush's complaint that Buchanan is "lying" about him--based on a perfectly legitimate Buchanan ad scoring Bush for dropping his family tax exemption from a list of priorities--calls up unpleasant images of Bob Dole's whining about Bush in 1988.

In fact, the best strategy for Bush is not to get out on the road for the next primaries, but to stay in Washington holding Congress's feet to the fire on his March 20 deadline for an economic package. Right now, however, Hill Republicans report that there is no White House effort to line up GOP lawmakers for any such thing. And instead of getting back to the conservative base of the Republican Party, the campaign continues to alienate it--as witness Mosbacher's recent meeting with the militant National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "Everyone here thinks the problem is that people are starting to believe Pat Buchanan," says one White House staffer, "when the real problem is that they no longer believe George Bush."

Mr. McGurn is NR's Washington Bureau Chief.