POLITICS

Front-running but on what?

By Scot Lehigh, Globe Staff, June 13, 1999

It's not quite Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but from the billing in Republican circles, this week's big event seems almost as momentous: George W. Bush is crossing the Merrimack.

Texas governor and presidential hopeful George W. Bush comes to New Hampshire for two days of campaigning with GOP hopes and expectations, as Groucho Marx once quipped of his taxes, as high as an elephant's eye.

So far, this hasn't been a campaign so much as a coronation. Bush, on the strength of 4 1/2 years in office, has attracted party support that eluded his more accomplished father when he sought the presidential nomination after a long career of public service, including eight years as vice president.

Without ever putting Texas in the rear-view mirror, George the younger has powered ahead of two-time Cabinet secretary Elizabeth Dole and 1996 New Hampshire primary victor Pat Buchanan. So large does he loom that primary veteran Lamar Alexander, undercapitalized and overshadowed, has scaled back his campaign from a full-fledged national effort to a hope-for-a-stumble stand in Iowa and New Hampshire.

"In New Hampshire as well as across the country, Bush is the front-runner," said David W. Moore, New Hampshire-based managing director of the Gallup Poll. "But we just completed a big survey that found that 7 of 10 Americans said they need to know more about him."

No surprise there. As many have noted, it's odd indeed that the Republican Party has anointed as its savior the son of man who only a few short years ago was reviled by many conservatives as a tax-raising apostate to the party's fiscal faith. It's odder still since George W. has collected scores of endorsements and millions of dollars while hardly offering a clue as to why he should be president.

"It can't be what he stands for," says Jim Glaser, a political scientist at Tufts University. "Who the heck knows?"

So what's powering Bush's candidacy? Big-state status, a well-known name, and a sense (affirmed by polls) that he could beat Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic favorite.

But electablility is marshy soil on which to build a primary campaign. So far, it has made Bush's candidacy seem conceived in committee and consumed with caution.

Which is where New Hampshire comes in. It's a state whose Republicans admire forthright, plain-spoken aspirants, a state whose penchant for surprise led it to back Henry Cabot Lodge's absentee write-in effort against such party titans as Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater in 1964; to flock to the take-charge qualities of Ronald Reagan in 1980; and to reward the mince-no-words conservatism of Buchanan in 1996.

"Bush is going to have to take some stands and answer some tough questions and New Hampshire will really be the first forum where he he has to do that," said John Camobreco, professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. "And this state has never been particularly kind to his father."

Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush barely staved off a challenge from Bob Dole there in 1988, and then only with the all-out help of John Sununu, who was governor. In 1992, New Hampshire Republicans gave insurgent Buchanan 37 percent of the vote -- enough to fuel his campaign against President Bush well into the South.

And George W. is no time-tested leader who can lay claim to party primogeniture. Indeed, a list of the nation's most effective, innovative, or hard-charging Republican governors would probably not include his name.

Certainly he's been no Tommy Thompson pushing a radical overhaul of welfare in Wisconsin; no Gary Johnson, waging a hammer and tong war for school vouchers in New Mexico; no Christine Todd Whitman, winning big tax cuts in New Jersey.

Rather, Bush has been the GOP equivalent of a second-term Michael Dukakis, a smart, cautious practitioner of the possible rather than a determined reformer.

"He likes to set modest, achievable goals, around which there exists a preordained consensus so he doesn't have to do much persuading," said Bruce Buchanan, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin.

Which is apparently the way Bush intends to run for president. As he comes to New Hampshire, Bush says he will focus on four issues: tax cuts, free trade, beefing up the military, and improving education.

Nevertheless, some of Bush's stands, such as his 1995 support for an NRA-backed "right to carry" law that overturned a longtime Texas ban on concealed weapons, will certainly provide general-election fodder. In an era when HMO has become a dirty word, his 1995 veto of a patients' rights bill might hurt even in a Republican primary.

And though it would have been a net tax cut, his 1997 plan -- in which he proposed raising the sales tax and taxing professional partnerships to finance a property tax reduction -- could lend itself to the sort of distorted attacks President Bush launched against Bill Clinton in 1992.

To be sure, George W. seems to have some of the true Texas grit his father lacked. Texas state Representative Tommy Merritt, a Republican, loves Bush because he has put himself on the front lines in the citizens' war against drugs, twice coming to Kilgore, in northeast Texas, to join a group of activists targeting drug dealers in their neighborhoods. The activists gather outside crackhouses and drug dens to shout slogans and keep watch.

"He not only does the talk, he walks the walk," enthuses Merritt. "He actually puts his feet in the street."

But on other high-profile issues, Bush has struck a low profile in courage. For instance, this year's attempt to pass a hate-crimes bill. The legislation, named after James Byrd Jr., the black man whose 1998 dragging murder horrified the nation, would have stipulated stepped-up penalties for crimes motivated by animus against one's race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.

Signing such a law, with the sexual orientation clause, would have angered religious conservatives, an important GOP voting bloc. But vetoing it would haved angered moderates (one Texas poll showed 70 percent of Texans favored the bill).

So Governor Bush temporized, trying to duck while his Senate allies worked to keep the bill bottled up in committee. That stance led to an uncomfortable meeting with Darrell Verrett, Byrd's nephew, and Renee Mullins, Byrd's daughter.

An emotional Mullins appealed to Bush for help with the bill. "I would hate to see my father die in vain," she said, her cousin remembers.

Distant and seemingly ill at ease, Bush was noncommittal, saying there were some parts of the bill he objected to.

Which ones? Bush said he would have to read the bill before specifying. Verrett produced a copy, handed it to the governor, and asked again what bothered him. Seemingly surprised, Bush set the bill aside, making it clear he wouldn't read it then and there, and politely ended the meeting, Verrett says.

"I think the whole meeting was just a political strategy move," Verrett said. "He had to say he had met with Byrd's family and was somewhat sympathetic . . . but it was an empty meeting that didn't resolve anything. He was very vague, defensive, and unemotional."

If that's the downside of cautious incrementalism, others say Bush also has a quality greatly missing among the the GOP's Washington wing in recent years: a willingness to work with the opposition. Norman Newton, executive director of the Associated Republicans of Texas, remembers that immediately after Bush's election in 1994, he walked the Capitol halls in Austin, meeting with legislators of both parties.

"He went into virtually every legislative office, Democrat or Republican, just to find out what their concerns were," Newton said. "He is very good at sitting down with the Democrats and working with them."

Yet beneath that geniality, there is a steely side to Bush. Thomas Pauken, a former Texas Republican Party chairman who served as executive director of ACTION, the federal volunteer agency under President Reagan, counted himself a Bush family friend until he decided to support Bob Dole for president in 1988. He recalls an encounter with George W. Bush in the early summer of 1988, at a Texas Republican barbecue.

George's father had vanquished Dole, the nomination was wrapped up, and the Bush forces could afford to be magnanimous. But George W. wasn't. Making a beeline toward Pauken, he delivered a stinging message.

Paraphrasing what he recalls Bush saying, Pauken says: "It was like, 'Pauken, you have burned the bridges . . . you have broken with the family, and you are going to pay a price.' " That said, Bush turned and stalked off, Pauken said.

Temporary pique? The old George W.? Well, perhaps.

Still, Pauken says Bush and his operatives opposed him when he ran for state party chairman in 1994 (he won), and worked behind the scenes to help his opponents last spring when he ran for state attorney general (he lost).

"He gets very personal," Pauken says of Bush. "He has a very thin skin and a very short fuse."

Retorts David Beckwith, Bush's communications manager: "Tom Pauken was one of the very few people who couldn't get along with Vice President Bush and unfortunately he transferred his feelings to his son."

A justifiable feud? Or another example of Bush's Texas temper, in this case smoldering away for more than a decade?

Bush claims to have doused that fiery temper, though others wonder if he's simply gotten better at banking the ire. Either way, a presidential campaign will test his temperament in a way Texas's good-old-boy politics haven't.

Put it all together and what does it suggest?

Just this: In market terms, what New Hampshire will see this week is George W. Bush's initial public offering. Unless the product proves compelling, don't be surprised if his stock falls.