exas Governor George W. Bush is running astray of one of the fundamental tenets of presidential politics: that issue positions should spring from where the candidate's head and heart are, not his feet.
Bush's remarkable letter to New York's Cardinal John O'Connor, regretting that he failed to distance himself adequately from anti-Catholic and race bias when he visited Bob Jones University in South Carolina, sounds an instant credibility alert.
Many New Yorkers will see just as much raw opportunism in Bush's answer to the Catholic archbishop, just 10 days before the New York primary, as in his decision to make Bob Jones U. his first South Carolina stop after losing New Hampshire.
No one has accused Bush of personal prejudice; his record would indicate the opposite. But he is neither naive nor a fool. He picks his campaign stops for good reason. The Bob Jones speech was an unmistakable signal of solidarity with the Christian right, and it paid off handsomely - in the short run. But once Bush had pocketed the badly needed victory in South Carolina, he could not walk away from the campaign that had given it to him.
This is the way it is and must be in presidential campaigns. Though the calendar describes a series of state-by-state contests, national concerns like race and religion cannot be fudged to attract a particular audience.
Now, Arizona Senator John McCain is attempting to make Bush pay a price for his bargain with the Christian right. Yesterday, McCain called evangelist Pat Robertson an ''agent of intolerance'' and said some of the charges Robertson had made against McCain supporters were divisive. Republicans, he said, ''are the party of Ronald Reagan, not Pat Robertson ... of Abraham Lincoln, not Bob Jones.''
This exchange is not the most elevating of the primary season. But race and religious bias are crucial national issues. McCain must be given credit for carrying his message to Robertson's home state of Virginia, which holds its primary today, and delivering a speech that tells the nation where he stands, not where he happens to be standing.
