The goofy politics of George Bush.

"POOR AUSTEN," said F. E. Smith of the lackluster British Conservative politician, Austen Chamberlain. "He always plays the gameand he always loses it." The epigram does not quite fit George Bush. About him one would have to say: "He always loses the game even when he wins it." He is the kind of gentlemanly competitor who fights hard to win but who then hands the cup to his defeated rival to show no hard feelings. Thus, Mr. Bush's first term has been a set of variations on the theme of "Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories" (not wholly coincidentally, the title of a book by Patrick J. Buchanan.)

To say this is to make a judgment not only about Mr. Bush, but also about the political situation of the moment. There are occasions, for instance wartime, when a bipartisan outlook is the right and sensible one. There are times when a broad consensus unites major politicians of all parties-for instance, the long consensus in the U.S. over the "containment" of the Soviet Union. But American politics today is more akin to a religious war (or to a number of overlapping religious wars) than to an Establishment game of Ins and Outs. The main battle is, of course, that between liberalism and conservatism. The problem for liberals is that their decline has reached the point at which their hold on power is seriously threatened. The problem for conservatives is that George Bush is apparently unaware of the fact and of the opportunities it offers. Liberaldom

THE DECLINE of American liberalism has been a long-drawn-out affair. In the 1964 election, southern whites, the disregarded spearcarriers of the Roosevelt coalition till then, started their march rightward. By 1976 only a minority of them voted for Jimmy Carter, even though he was the first Southerner to have a real shot at the Presidency since the Civil War. But the coalition started to collapse in earnest in 1980 when northern blue-collar workers deserted the Democrats in large numbers to vote for Ronald Reagan. Their defection finally robbed the Democratic Party nationally of its automatic majority status and led to the long Republican "lock" on the Presidency.

But the liberal coalition-though reduced to feminists, blacks, and white middle-class liberals unable to win a national election-remained surprisingly powerful. It managed to preserve its favorite spending programs under President Reagan; it hobbled the Administration's policy on Central America and arms control; it forced President Bush to abandon his election pledge and raise taxes; and it imposed a general obstacle to conservative policies during the Reagan-Bush years.

Liberal influence rested on a tripod of institutions and a fruitful political strategy. First, liberals predominated in those institutions of government that were not subject to direct democratic election-the courts, the bureaucracy, and in particular the "alphabet soup" of government agencies such as the FTC, the EEOC, the FEC, etc.

Second, America's cultural institutions-the media, publishing, universities, charitable foundations, even Hollywood-had been radicalized by the Sixties. Sociologists Rothman and Lichter showed that the "media elite" had voted 51 per cent for Jimmy Carter and only 25 per cent for Ronald Reagan when the latter won in a landslide. As a result journalists instinctively framed controversies in a liberal way, relied on liberal sources for quotes ("experts say, however . . ."), and leant generally to the liberal side. It wasn't bias, of course. How could it be? All their colleagues saw things the same way.

Third, Congress was firmly in Democratic and liberal hands. Incumbents had arranged the rules in order to entrench themselves by such devices as free congressional mailing to constituents. Money too went overwhelmingly to incumbents, starving challengers of the resources for an upset campaign. And they were finally protected by their constituents' relative lack of interest in their voting records in Washington. As opinion analyst William Schneider points out: the lower the office, the less people vote "ideologically." Liberal control of Congress seemed impregnable.

And, finally, this interlocking alliance was lubricated by a tax-spend-and-elect strategy. A liberal foundation would press for a spending program; the media would report its demands sympathetically ("experts say . . . ) ; the Congress would duly pass legislation to implement it; on the rare occasions when Republican resistance prevented this, the federal courts would insist that the Constitution required it; and tax dollars would flow to another liberal constituency which in return would deliver votes. That is how America was governed for about twenty years. The Reagan Insurrection

ONLY ONE development threatened the smooth working of this system (let us call it "liberaldom"). Republicans kept winning presidential elections: five out of the last six in fact. Over time that was bound to influence the political process.

Sure enough, when George Bush became President in 1989, the three legs of the liberal tripod of power were beginning to look shaky. After 11 years of Republican federal and judicial appointments, the courts could no longer be relied upon to enforce the liberal agenda on racial quotas, school busing, criminal-arrest procedures, abortion, and the Constitution.

Liberal control of the media too was being undermined by the proliferation of satellite and cable stations, which diluted the power of the three major liberal networks. Still more subversive was the rise of talk radio where conservative hosts like the ebullient Rush Limbaugh were the dominant figures. (Hollywood liberalism reacted to this threat by making movies in which talk-show hosts were the villains.)

Democratic control of Congress was similarly threatened by an ideological and demographic time-bomb. By 1989 some 40 per cent of Americans described themselves as moderates, 38 per cent as conservatives, and only 18 per cent as liberals. Under Schneider's Law above, the implications of this change were felt most immediately in presidential elections. As Humphrey Taylor and Robert Leitman point out in The (Unchanging Political Landscape, "If liberals vote Democratic and conservatives vote Republican, as they tend to, this puts the Democrats in the unenviable position of having to win about three-fourths of the moderate voters to win a majority in a presidential election."

But polls also showed a long-term political effect on party identification. Voters under 35 identified with the Republicans over the Democrats by margins of between 3 and 12 per cent while Democrats were concentrated among older voters. Unless an economic depression or some epochal scandal like Watergate intervened, therefore, the Republicans were likely to become the majority party around the turn of the century.

There was, however, a snag. At the same time as party identification shifted to favoring the Right, it was also becoming weaker. More and more voters were swayed by single issues, by taxes and the cost of government, by a general hostility to politicians and Washington D.C., and by economic prosperity.

The overall implication, however, was clear: provided that the Republicans stayed on the popular side of issues-which means provided public attention was fixed on their core issues like taxes-they were likely to become the majority party in time.

Here President Bush had been bequeathed a priceless legacy by the Reagan years. The tax-spendand-elect strategy of the Democrats had been rendered inoperative by three fiscal changes of the 1980s. The elimination of "indexing" under the 1981 tax reforms deprived the Federal Government of automatic increases in revenue due to inflation. The Gramm-Rudman mechanism for reducing the deficit laid down that if the requisite spending cuts were not agreed between the Presidency and Congress, an automatic process of sequestration would impose them. And President Reagan had established a credible threat to veto any tax hikes.

Together, these changes forced the government to bring its spending into line with revenue that could increase only as a result of economic growth. The federal deficit fell from 6.3 per cent of gross national product in 1983 to 3 per cent in 1989; and the annual rate of increase in federal spending, which had been 11 per cent in the ten years to 1985, was cut to 4 per cent annually from 1985 to 1988. As a result, it became all but impossible for the Democrats to buy votes with spending programs since such programs had to be, in effect, self-financing. When a classic liberal welfare measure, the Catastrophic Health Insurance Act, was passed in 1988, it included a tax surcharge on older taxpayers who were the bill's intended beneficiaries. The result was popular outcry, the heartwarming sight of Representative Dan Rostenkowski nearly being lynched by a mob of senior citizens, and cancellation of the law. Kinder, Gentler, More Liberal

WHEN beneficiaries of welfare legislation riot to secure its repeal, the world is a different place. This vivid confirmation of the bankruptcy of liberal politics at the start of Mr. Bush's watch should have told him something important. All he had to do was to defend the fiscal mechanisms left by President Reagan-and his Democratic opponents would fall to squabbling among themselves over which programs would get the limited funds available.

But Mr. Bush had different ideas. "A kinder, gentler America" is generally agreed to be the phrase that best expresses his political intentions. As rhetoric goes, it is a standard piece of vapid benevolence. But three meanings can be plausibly read into it. At its most abstract, it expresses Mr. Bush's distaste for the more rugged aspects of American individualism. That leads directly to the second meaning-a tacit concession that the Reagan years were, as their liberal critics allege, years of greed, rapacity, and vulgarity. A kinder, gentler government would thus accept greater regulation of economy and society in the common good. The third meaning is that since the Bush Administration (no longer led astray by unreasonable Reaganite ideologues) will be actuated by these common concerns, it should enjoy the cooperation of all reasonable people.

Mr. Bush has acted upon these principles, seeking bipartisan compromises with the Democratic leadership in Congress and appointing "moderate" critics to posts within his Administration (Arthur Fletcher to the Civil Rights Commission, William Reilly to the EPA). But insofar as these moves are an attempt to avoid conflict, they are a miscalculation. Leading Democrats might well be reasonable as private persons, but they are also politicians with a constituency to consider. And as the Democratic Party has declined into a "rainbow rump" of feminists, minority pressure groups, and academic liberals, so its left ideological commitment has become more pronounced. On all matters of importance, the congressional leadership must insist on the lion's share of any compromise.

As for appointing critics, that merely ensures disagreement will be initially confined within the Administration. That is a very modest benefit to be set against serious drawbacks. For the conflict gets into the press eventually via leaks that are often more damaging than an outside attack would have been. Meanwhile, the critics are bureaucratically strengthened in any dispute; the Administration is made more vulnerable to embarrassment; and any resulting compromise is pushed left. Thus, Mr. Bush's general wave of re-regulation, the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (respectively the provinces of Mr. Reilly and Mr. Fletcher), has imposed costly and burdensome regulations upon the economy with little public debate. Giving Away the Economy

AN ADMINISTRATION, internally divided between conservatives and moderates and in addition seeking compromises with a Democratic Congress, was bound to drift in a liberal direction. As long as Gramm-Rudman and the President's pledge of no new taxes" remained in place, however, there was a limit to such drift. There would simply be no new money for liberal projects. Hence the chief political controversy of the first twenty months of Mr. Bush's first term was whether taxes should be raised "to reduce the deficit." And taxes were duly raised in the budget agreement of 1990.

The economics of this agreement does not fall under the scope of this article. What can be said, however, is that it accommodated the largest increase in domestic federal spending since 1945. Gramm-Rudman was abandoned precisely because it would have required major spending cuts in, among other items, the entitlement programs that account for 48 per cent per cent of total spending and the largest part of its annual increase. If the deficit is a serious economic problem, as I certainly believe, it can hardly be a benefit to replace one system of expenditure control with another which has proved less effective on the test of experience and which was chosen for that very reason.

Whatever the economics, the budget deal proved a political disaster. Deprived of the potent tax issue, congressional Republicans lost ground in the 1990 mid-term elections in which they had earlier expected to improve their position. Once President Bush had abandoned opposition to a tax hike, moreover, the Democrats made the issue "what kind of tax hike-a Democratic one designed to achieve 'fairness' or a Republican one designed to raise revenue?" That concentrated public attention on the Democrats' core issue of equality and highlighted the unattractive elitist aspects of the GOP's image. Meanwhile, the absence of a tax constraint on higher spending saw a flowering of Democratic programs that had hitherto been concealed. And as 1991 wore on, Mr. Bush was driven by events into proposing bigger and bigger cuts in defense expenditure that the "Chinese wall" in the budget deal had been designed to avert. The difference was that whereas before the 1990 deal the defense savings would have been redeployed to deficit-reduction under Gramm-Rudman, now they will be allocated to domestic spending in the liberal interest. All in all, a fiasco.

Not for the first time, a President was saved by a war. The success of Desert Storm gave him high approval ratings with the general public, restored him in conservative esteem, banished the "wimp" image, probably for good, and eclipsed the budget deal in the public memory. He had won himself a second chance. No White Males Need Apply

IT CAME in the form of racial and sexual quotas. Quotas are perhaps the single most important issue to the liberal coalition. They embody the modern liberal view that group rights should take precedence over individual rights in law and custom. Support for them unites all elements of the liberal coalition: the old civil-rights leadership, feminists, and white liberals in the federal bureaucracy, the media, and the universities. And they strengthen and lubricate the coalition, giving patronage to civil-rights leaders, added powers of regulation to the bureaucracy, and an incentive for people in the favored groups to vote for liberal politicians.

Conservatives had, of course, attacked the principle of quotas for over two decades. To bar someone, who has never been guilty of discrimination, from employment or promotion, in order to benefit someone else, who has never been a victim of discrimination, simply because each belongs to a racial or sexual group that has been respectively advantaged or disadvantaged in history, is plainly an injustice to the individual and an expression of reverse racism. As quotas spawned new classes of disadvantaged people-small businesses, men in general and white males in particular, this argument had increasing appeal. Indeed, subterranean resentment over quotas probably accounted in large part for one of the most misunderstood phenomena of recent politics-the so-called "gender gap."

This expresses not the liberalism of women, as most media comments suggest, but the collapse of Democratic support among men. Reagan, for instance, had a lead among men of 61 per cent to 37 per cent in the 1984 election against Walter Mondale. The gender gap achieved no more than to hold Reagan's lead among women down to a healthy 8 per cent. And although women finally voted Democratic by the slimmest of margins in 1988 (50 per cent for Dukakis, 49 per cent for Bush), the gender gap handed Bush 58 per cent of men, 67 per cent of white men, and 73 per cent of southern white men-and, of course, a substantial overall victory. Quotas were the Republican Party's "fairness issue."

This well-kept secret emerged in 1990 with Jesse Helms's victory in the North Carolina race. It grew in salience when President Bush gave his first reluctant veto of the Kennedy Civil Rights Bill, rightly interpreting it as a quota measure, and discovered the veto was popular. And it gathered steam throughout 1991 when the civil-rights bill was brought forward a second time and negotiations between Congress and the Senate began over how to avoid a second veto. Liberals were in a quandary: they could neither abandon quotas nor defend them honestly. Mr. Bush had the popular side of a major issue. And then the Clarence Thomas confirmation fight demonstrated that Mr. Bush's posture was even stronger that it seemed.

Clarence Thomas was a black conservative firmly opposed by the traditional civil-rights leadership precisely because he was against quotas. Despite that, black Americans ended up supporting his nomination by substantially larger margins than whites-70 per cent compared to 50 per cent. Black political attitudes, moreover, were already showing a shift to the right. Polls showed Bush to be about twice as popular as Reagan with black respondents. That could prove catastrophic for those Democratic senators and congressmen who rely for their margin of victory on a monolithic black loyalty. Of the 17 senate Democrats up for election this year, no fewer than seven won their 1986 victories on that basis.

Feminist claims to represent American women, denouncing Thomas and endorsing Anita Hill, were similarly undermined when substantial majorities of women told pollsters they wanted Thomas confirmed (53 per cent) and believed him over Hill (45 per cent). And on top of everything else, the liberal coalition emerged from the Thomas nomination battle believing its own media propaganda and so parroting precisely the wrong lessons: a) that Thomas won because of a ruthless Republican campaign akin to the Willie Horton ads in 1988, but b) that this fortunately didn't matter because the hearings established sexual harassment as a grave national epidemic which the Democrats could exploit in 1992. One might have supposed that even liberal Democrats could not devise a policy that would drive still more men into the Republican column; but one would have underestimated them.

Mr. Bush, then, emerged from the Thomas affair with a principled stance on quotas that had popular backing against an opposition that could not deliver the votes. Within a month, he had signed the quota bill.

Again, whatever the legal arguments-and even a sympathetic commentator like Terry Eastland in The American Spectator concedes that gains in the fine print were paid by major concessions of principle-the political implications are uniformly bad. It undercuts black conservatives, Mr. Bush's allies in the minority community, by abandoning the ground of principle on which they have taken their stand. It is a concession that will build up the prestige and influence of their rivals in the civil-rights leadership. It thus strengthens the liberal coalition which, no longer embarrassed on the issue, declares that even the use of the word quota" is an indication of racism. It has alienated the conservative wing of the Republican Party, prompting Pat Buchanan to run in New Hampshire. It has handed the quota issue to the former Nazi, David Duke, thus making it less respectable for other candidates (perhaps including Mr. Bush later in the campaign). And it will reduce the social-cum-cultural appeal of the Republicans to male voters, driving blue-collar "Reagan Democrats" into political apathy. Once again, a fiasco-and a completely unneccessary one. New World, Old Order

MR. BUSH is commonly excused at this point on the grounds that he is not, after all, a "domestic President." His speciality is foreign policy. But an enduring foreign policy depends ultimately on domestic support. And that depends in turn on whether a political leader can articulate a long-term strategic vision with broad popular appeal. President Bush's version of this is the New World Order.

Let us concede at once that the phrase, with its overtones of a naive Wilsonian internationalism, is an unfortunate one. What made matters worse, however, was the President's failure to give it any real and consistent substance. His first formulation, seeking liberal support for the Gulf War, seemed to endorse a Wilsonian deference to the United Nations. His postwar interpretation treated the stability of the existing world order as a U.S. interest to be pursued by an amoral Realpolitik. In practice this led to a series of miscalculations toward Iraq, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union in which United States support for an inherently unstable status quo only promoted instability. But even if this indiscriminate stabilization had succeeded, it would have exerted no particular appeal to the American people.

To do that, Mr. Bush would have needed a policy combining the pursuit of U.S. interests with the promotion of American values (such as democracy and free markets). Neither is enough on its own. Taken together, though, each justifies and restrains the other. In particular, considerations of the national interest would prevent the promotion of democracy becoming a rash globalist crusade; and support for open markets would restrain nationalism from degenerating into a short-sighted protectionism. If the New World Order had been defined in those terms, the resulting "Pax Americana in sheep's clothing" would have been broadly acceptable to Americans in general and conservatives in particular.

As it is, Mr. Bush's lack of vision has proved politically disastrous. The Democrats, whose concept of a good foreign policy is no foreign policy, are telling Americans that the answer to a world in which the spread of protectionism threatens to interact nastily with the spread of nuclear weapons is either an increase in federal spending on education or some expression of hostility toward Japan. The Right is distracted by a virtual civil war between the two extremes of crusading democratic globalists and protectionists-cum-isolationists. And Mr. Bush himself, as William McGurn demonstrates above, is being dragged along in the direction of these various nostrums because he has been unable to formulate his own firm response. A fiasco, then, in the making. Sleeping through the Eighties

IS THERE, as the psychiatrists say, a pattern here? Mr. Bush has consistently failed to recognize political opportunities when they presented themselves. He drew back almost instinctively from political victories on quotas and taxes. He could not make sense of a New World Order except in terms of the old. He did not see that he could preside over a historic shift away from the liberal hegemony in U.S. politics by the simple expedient of doing nothing. His reaction on all these occasions has been to compromise with the Democratic leadership in order to save it from outright defeat.

We cannot put this down to defects of character. Mr. Bush is a patriotic, experienced, and talented man. He has shown, on abortion, a willingness to endure political unpopularity in defense of an important principle. He displayed courage and a prudent risk-taking over the Gulf War. And when it comes to electioneering rather than governing, he gets good at politics.

His failure is essentially one of imagination. As Keynes pointed out, few people emancipate themselves from the views they acquire in early manhood. Mr. Bush formed his convictions in the 1940s when liberalism was the dominant set of ideas. He was himself a moderate conservative. But conservatives in those days lost everything except elections, and the lesson stuck.

All that changed in the 1980s, but Mr. Bush seems to have slept through the period. He was Vice President, professionally loyal, but his views scarcely changed.

So when as President he found liberalism on the ropes, he threw in the towel.

President Butterfly

POOR George Bush. Little more than a year ago, he was looking down from the Olympian heights of a virtually unprecedented 80 per cent approval rating. These days the cameras revel in showing him crawling out from under a table in Tokyo after getting sick at a state dinner. Certainly he's not the first Western leader to make a spectacle of himself in a part of the world where the locals view such occurrences as portents of divine displeasure. Back when Margaret Thatcher visited Peking to negotiate the future of Hong Kong, a stumble down the steps of the Great Hall of the People had folks whispering that she was kowtowing to Mao (don't laugh, they turned out to be right). Best not to speculate what the Japanese made of President Bush's first appearance in their country, at a Toys 'R' Us chain in Osaka with Geoffrey the Giraffe.

In many ways the President's trip provides a perfect illustration of the chaos that has beset the Administration since the end of Desert Storm. Originally planned for early December to deal with regional security and the like, the trip was canceled after Democrats began hollering that Bush was spending too much time abroad. Throw in Pat Buchanan's increasingly unabashed protectionism (his latest fund-raising letter declares that the "92-month-long economic boom has been put on a fast track to Mexico"), and the President's trip was not only rescheduled, it was recast. The trip was now, Bush said, about jobs, jobs, jobs." Overnight, another shift in presidential positions could be detected.

The groundwork had been laid by Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher hinting on Meet the Press that the White House agreed Japan was partially to blame for a recession the President had previously said didn't exist and was over anyway. Administration officials then let it out that the focus in Japan would be to make the Japanese buy a given number of American autos that even Americans no longer believe are good buys. And President Bush himself started referring to the Free Trade Agreement with Mexico as a "fair-trade agreement." In short, the President has again started out with the right position only to let it wither away in an effort to please all sides. To make matters even worse, he confirmed his establishment image by toting along 18 American corporate chiefs, including the heads of Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors.

"No one's ever accused George Bush of being a man of the people, but to go and hang out with these guys only confirms the worst stereotypes," says Richard Rahn, formerly chief economist with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and now president of Novecon Corporation. "If he wanted to take along some Americans he should at least have picked some entrepreneurial types in new industries."

To be sure, Japan does discriminate against many imports; the huge disparity between Japanese and U.S. rice prices will tell you that. But letting Lee Iacocca make the case dilutes the argument, for the simple reason that American cars don't sell even in open markets. In three years in Hong Kong, completely open to the Big Three, I can't recall seeing one Chrysler, though Mercedeses, Volvos, and BMWs were common. The long and short of it is that however unfair the Japanese may be there is no way to protect our producers without punishing our consumers and ultimately making our own economy less efficient. If Bush really were interested in opening markets, he would more profitably spend his time trying to forge free-trade agreements with Eastern Europe, to help pressure the sensitive GATT negotiations in the right direction, and to foil the Fortress Europeans who threaten to transform the New World Order into an earth with three economic blocs perpetually trying to keep out one another's goods.

Now, no one really thinks Bush a protectionist. Ironically, at the same time the President was "getting tough" with Tokyo his Vice President was up in New Hampshire pleading with voters not to send the Administration a protectionist message by siding with Pat Buchanan. More probably, as Brian Hindley of the London School of Economics notes, he is just responding to pressure. "If Congress were left to its own devices," he says, "they would probably pass a great deal of protectionist measures. In bashing Japan just a little, the Bush gamble is that doing a moderately bad thing will hold them off from doing extremely bad things. Of course that's an extremely dangerous game."

Indeed it is. Just as he did with taxes and civil rights, Bush has opted for the pre-Reagan Republican tack of the same but less. This strategy has already yielded us a Civil Rights Act that re-establishes quotas, a Clean Air Act whose costs are about to hit an economy already in recession, a tax increase that has led to even more government spending, and an-about-to-be-launched economic package that at this writing appears to put back into place all the special-interest barnacles that were the target of the Reagan Revolution.

The consequences are especially grave in the area of trade-until now one of the issues that put Bush on the side of the angels vis-i-vis Buchanan-because the potential for political demagoguery and economic mischief is so high. While Buchanan accurately takes credit for forcing Bush in his direction, even before he threw his hat into the ring, Administration officials such as Trade Representative Carla Hills (who inexplicably was sent neither to Tokyo nor to GATT negotiations) were more comfortable with terms such as "open markets," "market access," and "free and fair trade." The difference may be subtle but it remains significant.

"Bush's increasing use of the term 'fair trade' is a sign he's lost his grasp of policy on trade and sets up a bidding war that he is guaranteed to lose because the Democrats will always go higher," says James Bovard, author of The Fair Trade Fraud. "Gephardt's already offered the bill to prove it," he adds, referring to the Missouri Democrat's proposal to limit Japanese auto sales if the trade deficit does not go down. All Bush has done with this trip is inflame appetites no Republican Administration can ever satisfy.

To do it on the Asian stage, moreover, only courts disaster at a ticklish moment in trade negotiations and sends a perilous signal to a critical part of the world economy. Geoffrey the Giraffe could probably have told him that, but, as usual, it was Kipling who put it best: And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East." -WILLIAM McGURN