The establishment man.

THE DAY AFTER George Bush and Michael Dukakis first met to debate which of them was better qualified to go to the White House, I went to look at their houses.

Governor Dukakis's house in Brookline, the one whose garage contains the famous snow-blower, is only thirty minutes ftom Logan Airport by car, so I went there first. Brookline was the location of America's first country club -which is to say, the first place rich WASPs built to flee the advance of social-climbing ethnics-in this case, the Irish. When an English golf writer made a humorous reference to this fact in a piece on the 1988 U.S. Open, which was played in Brookline, Boston's Mayor Flynn went ballistic. (Even now, the ethnic resentments of Boston make New York look like the Peaceable Kingdom.) The Irish soon found the way to Brookline, however, along with, as the world now knows, some Greeks.

Dukakis's street was neat and slumbrous. The only sign that a resident was seeking higher office was a Secret Service man, reading a magazine on the Duke's front sidewalk. There are two small apartment buildings on one end of the block. The rest is houses, sixty years old or more, with odd little turrets and widow's walks, sharing their tiny lots with tall trees. A few of the driveways were unsurfaced, which I took to be a sign of chic. Plastic trash bags lined the curbs, bulging with pine needles and chestnuts. The bumper stickers on the parked cars-SAVE THE WHALES, WE'RE HORSE PEOPLE-MUST have been supplied by Lee Atwater.

An hour and a half, and a rung up the social ladder away, lies George Bush's summer house in Kennebunkport. Fromany distance, the Maine coast is bleak: pine trees giving way to flat nothing. Only in the ditches, filled in September with asters and touch-me-nots, does it brighten up.

The Bush house is around the corner from the harbor mouth, on Walker Point. Walker, as it happens, was the maiden name of George Bush's mother, Dorothy. His father, Prescott, in marrying her married up. The Vice President himself only bought full title to the house a few years ago. Here, the Secret Service had blocked the driveway with saw-horses. Back of these stood two fieldstone gateposts with bronze light stands-original work. The house has been so added to it's hard to guess its Twenties shape. On the grounds, you can glimpse a swimming pool, a tennis court, a flagpole. On this street there was some rubbernecking, but still no fanfare. An elderly Englishman squinting through a pair of binoculars asked me if there was anything special hereabouts. I told him, George Bush's house.

"Rilly," he said, surprised. George Bush vacationed in Maine, but he grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. (He was born in Milton, Massachusetts-not far from Brookline.) Walt Harrington, writing about Bush's background in The Washington Post Magazine, spoke of "homes visible from the road only when the leaves were off the trees." This is not true of the former Bush home in Greenwich, which is plainly visible, atop a wide, sloping lawn, between the rhododendrons and the maples. The house is grey stucco, bulky, and burgerlich. You could make the porte-cochere from the street with a good chip shot. Here George Bush grew up; here his father made his penultimate career move, into a partnership at Brown Brothers, Harriman.

The cabbie who took me past the old Bush house threw in Bush's mother's and his brother's houses as extras. Jonathan Bush's street was half-lined with roadblocks, alternating left and right, with warnings to drive slowly on account of children. I asked if this was a private street. The cabbie wasn't sure. "When the whole street's wealthy, they consider it private." Then, a supply-side sentiment, with an apposite spin on it. "What the Democrats don't understand is, when you raise taxes, it hurts the little guy. It doesn't hurt the rich."

THE POINT OF ALL THIS pOlitical real estate is simply that George Bush was bound to figure in one elite or another, if he had the talent and the inclination. There was a good chance that the elite would be political: Prescott Bush's last move was into the United States Senate; he supported Ike in the GOP donnybrook of 1952. The Bushes were not uppermost crust: you could, after all, drop Walker Point and Grove Lane into the Rockefeller demesne at Pocantico Hills, and never find them again. The Bushes, father and son, worked for their money-or, more precisely, worked to keep it and make more of it. (Some people, not all of them liberals, become surprisingly enraged when you point this out.) But George Bush, living where he lived, growing as he grew, could claim charter membership in any establishment going.

The politically relevant question, if the voters let him grow into the Oval Office, is, How willing or able will he be to build an establishment with conservatives in it?

Conservatives are not, in truth, the best establishmentmaking material. "The Right," says Burt Pines of the Heritage Foundation, "does not like to settle down and march through institutions. It wants to do the job and get out. If George Bush were to say, I want to create a community of prestige-of people who are reflexively asked to comment by the press; who, when they go overseas, are treated as dignitaries, and when they go to parties, are treated as celebrities; who, when they send an 0p-Ed piece to any of the ten leading newspapers, the burden falls on the editors to say, I won't run it-one could devise a strategy by which George Bush does it.

"First, there are hundreds of presidentially appointed advisory boards and panels. They don't have much power, but they credential. Second, use George Bush's public andprivate appearances over eight years to enhance the stature of various people. When you send the secretary of state to New York, and he gets an invitation to address the Council on Foreign Relations, the secretary says, 'I'd like to do it, but I'm addressing the Committee for the Free World.' If you have a strategy, in eight years you can do it. It's easy, it's free."

Governing, of course, is less easy. For years, conservatives judged George Bush's disposition-to turn to them for tasks easy or hard-to be slight. "His natural bent," Irving Kristol offered, "is to be someone like Governor Kean. Maybe his natural bent will bend."

But these days it is possible to turn up surprising numbers of conservatives who are more sanguine. "In 1980," says John Sununu, governor of New Hampshire, "I was a Reagan supporter because Reagan appeared to be more conservative [than George Bush]. He had a longer record, starting with the Goldwater speech, that made him a focal point for the conservative agenda. George Bush has not only served this President well, but has become a strong advocate for that agenda. On issues conservatives say are important to them, he has gone well past what could be called lip service."

Sununu, of course, is a partisan; if he is not rewarded with a Cabinet post for his services to George Bush in the New Hampshire primary, then there is no gratitude in human hearts. But it is possible to test the cool view and the hopeful view with specific instances.

The conservative sectaries who are uneasiest with Bush are the right-to-lifers. The Wake Forest debate was discouraging. Bush repeated his convention pledge-adoption, not abortion-but fell with a thump into the trap, laid by one of the reporters and sprung by Dukakis, of seeming to consider criminal penalties for women who have abortions. "In Church law, common law, American law until Roe, it was the abortionist that was supposed to swing, not the mother," says Jim McFadden, publisher of The Human Life Review. "Why he doesn't know that, I don't know. The message he exudes to the activists is that it's an issue he doesn't care about. Most of them I'm in touch with are working for him, but they're bitching."

AN INTERVIEW BUSH gave a New York Times reporter in August on SDI sent tremors through the ranks of the strategic defenders. In a long talk with Gerald M. Boyd, Bush called SDI "very expensive," and admitted he was "not at the point where I am prepared to say, go forward this minute" with even partial deployment. The Times headlined all this, BUSH IS CAUTIOUS. Strategicdefense advocate Gregory Fosscdal notes that "the strategic-defense crowd all endorsed Kemp." Bush "likes SDI as a research program. How ready does he think it has to be?" Kim Holmes, of the Heritage Foundation, who submits papers on the subject to the Bush campaign, admitted to being "a bit perplexed" when the Times interview first appeared. "I became less concerned the more I got tbe impression that the Times had its own agenda"-that is, fishing for quotations that could make Bush seem hesitant. "We arc still not exactly sure where George Bush would head with it. But people were not exactly sure where Reagan was heading with it."

"Does Bush know in his gut," Burt Pines asked me, "that SDI is important because it reduces the Soviet Union from a superpower to a big Third World country? I don't know. On the other hand, Bush understands the arguments [for it] in a way Reagan doesn't."

Conservatives can also point to successes in getting Bush's attention. Two of these were tactical. The conservative community first learned of Governor Dukakis's Pledge veto from a Boston Globe reporter, who mentioned it to a

Washington conservative who prefers to blush unseen. The blusher passed the tidbit to Representative Newt Gingrich, who fed it to the Bush campaign. Gingrich's high standing with the Bushmen is something of a phenomenon. They began to look kindly upon the Georgia congressman when his crusade against Jim Wright took the spotlight off Ed Meese, and the heat off them. Gingrich, for his part, says, "I've only seen George Bush for thirty minutes this year." But the Bush campaign "is the most open bureaucracy I've ever worked with." When the furlough issue was fed to the Bush campaign by the Washington conservative apparat, the Bushmen brought in Grover Norquist, an old conservative hand, to manage it.

There is general satisfaction with several of the campaign's regular personnel. Jim Pinkerton and Debbie Steelman in the policy shop draw high praise, as does the rhetoric of Peggy Noonan. "The reason Bush speeches sound like some of the same old stuff," says Gingrich, "is that they're the same old stuff." At the topmost level, the selection of Dan Quayle, the ensuing steeplechase apart, smoothed many a feather. "I know of a number of major conservative organizations," says Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation-and he cites evangelicals, anti-abortionists, and right-to-workers-"that are backing the ticket because they feel faith was kept with them" in the vicepresidential pick.

Sununu cites Bush's child-care proposal as an "excellent example" of conservative-issue success. "Child care will be a major social issue in the Nineties. George Bush worked aggressively to present a program that would spend money, not on the child-care industry, but on children." The Bush program is not a Reagan-era boldover, but "started as a clean sheet of paper." It is now "purely a George Bush program."

At the Polyconomics Church of the Supply Side, Jude Wanniski is guardedly optimistic, He is no fan of Treasury Secretary Nick Brady, and says of Jim Baker that "he has gone back and forth between Keynesians and supply-siders." The most important task of a Bush Administration, Wanniski thinks, "should be to shake up the world economic bureaucracies. The World Bank, the IMF, the State Department, and the Treasury Department are still selling austerity abroad. We need a supply-side perestroika." If Dick Darman were to become under-secretary of state for economic affairs, under Jim Baker, Wanniski would leap and dance.

He notes that Bush, in the Wake Forest debate, claimed the advice of Stanford's Michael Boskin, whom Wanniski likes, and of Harvard's Martin Feldstein, whose gloomy prognostications he deplores. "Feldstein's influence has diminished because of forecasting flaws. We're now in the 71st month of recovery. I'm fairly upbeat about a Bush Administration. I think Bush really learned a lot in the last seven years ftom having lunched with Ronald Reagan alone."

REPEATEDLY, ONE SENSES Conservatives discovering the virtues of what was, six or seven years ago, a despised species: pragmatists. Bush, Paul Weyrich told me, "is not an intellectual in the sense he cares about issues philosophically. But he's very curious who's on which side, and why they're there, and how things come about. Jack Kemp already knew everything; Bob Dole was cynical. George Bush has a certain naivete that is refreshing. One can bring him pieces of information which he seems interested in absorbing." Lee Atwater, Weyrich says of Bush's campaign powerhouse "understands pragmatically that conservatism is the majority of the country. If you say, 'If you do this, these people will be angry,' that computes."

Gingrich offers a similar opinion of Bob Teeter, Bush's washed-in-the-bloodless moderate pollster. "Teeter understands the value of polarizing the Center-Right against the Left in a way he didn't even five years ago."

That is fine for the campaign season, But what about the following four, or eight, years? Burt Pines worries about a narrow victory, of the kind Richard Nixon won in 1968. "Nixon's reaction then was to reach out to the Left, Ronald Reagan spent his first term undoing not what FDR did, but what Richard Nixon had done in his first term."

The way to keep pragmatists in line, the Washington Right is saying, is pressure. "You couldn't use conservative networks in the Reagan Administration to oppose Ronald Reagan," Weyrich says regretfully. "Whatever he did, they still couldn't bring themselves to oppose the old man." A Bush White Hous "will lack the ability to quiet conservative unrest. If the networks are used, he may feel some beat."

Gingrich, it seems to me, deserves the last word. "All winning an election does is give you permission to get into the middle of the wrestling match."

As Russell Kirk used to say, Amen to that. The moment Ronald Reagan won in 1980, lights began going out all over the conservative mind, at least in those sectors of it that controlled political will power. He was our man. That was all on earth we knew, and all we needed to know, The high point, or low point, was the last NR editorial on the TEFRA bill-the Dole tax hike-of 1982, which the White House had finally decided to support. After weeks of hammering it, passionately and learnedly, we fired our last salvo-to which we tacked a P. S. saying that, though it was dumb, Reagan had invested precious political capital in it: therefore, pass it. (What about our capital?) Who said A, said Q.

George Bush, bless him, can't get away with that. I wonder if he will even try. He is an honorable man, who stabs a fellow in the front, never in the back. The patriotism that took him straight from Andover to the Pacific still burns in him. Most important, he is a politician. His 26-year career in the Republican Party coincides exactly with the ascendancy of the conservative wing. He has seen what works. Why shouldn't it be his future?