eorge W. Bush first babbled about ''compassionate conservatism'' last winter when he was a cipher in a cocoon. Virtually declared the Republican nominee for president without having done any campaigning, he had not yet confronted the unsavory task of wrestling with the demons in his party.
Pledging to perform a modern miracle, Bush said he would champion the policies of the right - cutting taxes and promoting longer prison sentences and smaller government - while making sure ''no child gets left behind.'' He said his shrunken government would nonetheless ''inspire people to reach out to other people.''
Now that Bush is having to wrestle with the demons, he is reaching out all right - to the far-out right. ''Compassionate conservatism'' is no grand mosaic of noblesse oblige. In reality, it is Bush obliging the ignoble. ''Compassionate conservatism'' simply means being compassionate to conservatives.
This became clear in Bush's handling of Pat Buchanan in the last seven days. Buchanan, the paranoid activist for white Christian rights who masquerades as a protectionist populist, is thinking of bolting the Republican Party for the Reform Party.
A handful of Republicans, among them presidential candidate John McCain, said the party should show Buchanan the door. Besides his longstanding myopia on people of color, gay men and lesbians, and non-Christian religions, Buchanan recently poured more lighter fluid on his toes by asserting in a new book that the West overreacted to a Hitler who was no threat to the United States. McCain said Buchanan's book is ''so far outside of the philosophy of what America is all about that it's unacceptable.''
It was not unacceptable to Bush. Bush said: ''I don't want Pat Buchanan to leave the party. I think it's important, should I be the nominee, to unite the Republican Party. I'm going to need every vote I can get among Republicans to win the election.''
Two days ago Bush repeated his desire for Buchanan to stay in the party even as he blamed Buchanan and Ross Perot for bleeding to death the 1992 presidential campaign of his father with a ''thousand cuts.'' On top of that, Republican Party chairman Jim Nicholson pleaded with Buchanan not to leave the party, asking Buchanan to consider that a Republican split could result in liberal Democratic appointments to the Supreme Court.
For Bush to be so compassionate with this particular demon is a dead giveaway that he would display no courage on the divisive issues that would lie ahead of him as president. If you cannot stand up to Buchanan, whom can you stand up to?
Buchanan has said that AIDS is nature's ''retribution against homosexuals.'' He has opposed virtually every modern civil rights law. He has praised the ''winning issues'' of ex-Ku Klux Klansman and politician David Duke. He has said Hitler was a man of ''great courage.'' He has said women are not endowed with the ''single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism.''
The acceptance of Buchanan comes in the wake of Bush's cowardice over a proposed hate crimes law in Texas. The law was proposed after James Byrd, an African-American, was dragged to death by a truck driven by white racists. Senate Republicans in the Texas Legislature killed the bill. Senate Democrats charged that the Republicans would not go forward with a bill that singled out penalties not only for racist crimes but also for hate crimes against gay men and lesbians.
''It all gets back to sexual orientation,'' said state Senator John Whitmire. Whitmire said that despite the gruesome lynching of Byrd, the inclusion of homosexuals in the bill was too much of a ''political litmus test'' for the Republicans to handle.
Less than two months ago Bush was winning praise for appearing to be a sensitive conservative. California political consultant Allan Hoffenblum said, ''George Bush isn't listening to the loony right.'' Republican consultant Eddie Mahe said Bush ''is a conservative without scaring people.''
That illusion is over. By being silent on the hate crimes law and by begging for the leader of the loony right to remain a Republican, Bush is becoming scary by showing no desire to drive out the demons. If he cannot drive them out of his own party, which is virtually ready to hand him the nomination, there is no reason to think the cipher will do anything except crawl back into his cocoon at the first crisis in the White House.
After all, a candidate who blusters that a rival helped inflict a thousand cuts on his father yet still wants that rival in the fold is also likely to wait until a thousand cuts have been inflicted upon the disenfranchised and the oppressed before offering a dollop of his ''compassionate conservatism.''
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist.
