HILADELPHIA - In this campaign of psycho-biography, and especially in the wake of last week's GOP convention, there's scarcely an acre of George W. Bush's formative experience left unplowed.
We know of young George's light-hearted manner, developed to console a grieving mother, and the back-slapping bonhomie honed at Andover. We've felt his pain at Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin's cruel comment that his father had been defeated for the US Senate by ''a better man.''
We've winced at drunken George's Oedipal offer to go mano a mano with his old man, empathized with feral George's need to break out of his father's long shadow, and celebrated mature George's 40th-birthday decision to choose Laura Bush over Jack Daniels.
And yet when it comes to predicting what presidential George W. Bush would do, we might be better off paying a little less attention to personality and a little more to the ideas and principles that would inform his policy-making.
Bush didn't spell out each and every one in his acceptance speech Thursday, but like the riverbed boulders that shape the current above, they were all there, guiding his vision of the ''responsibility era'' he promised.
Some were apparent: With a tax cut scored at $1.3 trillion over nine years ($1.9 trillion over 10, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a progressive nonprofit), Bush wants to lessen Washington's claim on the wallet so that, as vice-presidential nominee Dick Cheney phrased it on Wednesday, families ''can spend more on what they value rather than on what the government thinks is important.''
But what other ideas would guide the second President Bush?
A renewed federalism
Remember that the nomination of George W. Bush represents the victory of the Republican Party's governors over its congressfolk. One defining belief of the chief political executives is that decisions on most matters affecting the states are best made in state capitals rather than in Washington.
Bush, who is after all in his second term as chief executive in Texas, appears as serious as anyone about that devolution. ''He's a governor and he knows that governors focus on getting results,'' said Governor Paul Cellucci, a close ally, in a convention-floor interview.
Not only has Bush mentioned that time and again on the stump, he has built it into his proposals. Bush, says Stephen Goldsmith, his chief domestic policy adviser, ''rejects the idea that what government needs to do is go away, that there is no reason for government, but he also rejects the view that the role of government is Washington-centric and kind of statist.''
In practical terms, that means pushing decisions down to lower levels of government. When it comes to education, for example, the federal government would set standards, but it would be up to the states and communities to decide how best to meet them.
The upside of that approach is that by once again turning the states into the laboratories of democracy, experimentation could highlight programs that work, the way Wisconsin and Massachusetts have with their revamps of welfare and Texas has with its efforts to improve education.
The trade-off is that while some states will excel, others may well founder, leading to a disparity of services nationwide.
Going to market
Another of Bush's basic tenets is a broad faith in the marketplace as a way to maximize choice and efficiency. ''A key principle is that, when government helps, it should do so through individual choices,'' says Goldsmith. ''He respects individuals and the marketplace.''
That belief has been expressed in two ways that have attracted particular campaign-trail attention. Most notable is Bush's plan to let Americans invest a portion of their Social Security payroll tax in the stock market, an idea which proved so popular that Vice President Al Gore, due to be nominated officially by the Democrats next week, quickly followed suit with a similar proposal of his own.
''That is the most significant example both of his philosophy on wealth creation and of giving authority to individuals, as opposed to the Washington bureaucracy,'' says Goldsmith. A second is Bush's proposal for a refundable tax credit to help low-income families purchase private health-care coverage.
More controversial, and muted, is Bush's scheme for federal education dollars. Here's how he put it in his convention acceptance speech: ''When a school district receives federal funds to teach poor children, we expect them to learn. And if they don't, parents should get the money to make a different choice.''
That's a voucher program that dares not quite speak its name. But even if Bush avoids the ideologically charged word, a voucher by any other name still smells as sweet to free-marketeers.
Anathema to teachers unions, that approach has growing appeal to minorities, who are disproportionately trapped in underperforming urban schools. Which is why it should come as no surprise that Colin Powell endorsed the idea in his own speech, saying: ''Let's experiment prudently with school voucher programs to see if they help. Let's use innovation and competition ... to help give our children the best education possible.''
The advantages of such an approach are several: increased choice, access to better schools, and, if competition has the same salutary effects on schools as it does on every other human endeavor, improved public schools as well.
But there are also disadvantages. Ultimately, vouchers will need Supreme Court clearance, at least if they are to apply to religious schools - and without religious schools, Bush's plan would be unlikely to offer a wide array of affordable choice.
A second drawback to Bush's market orientation is that although increased choice carries the prospect of greater reward, it also comes with greater risk. Expect Gore to make much of that risk in his critique of Bush's Social Security plan.
Faith in faith
Bush is a stout supporter of letting faith-based groups use public dollars to provide social service more typically delivered by government or secular nonprofits - but not, his advisers insist, simply because he believes himself personally redeemed.
''I think he's ultimately a pragmatist,'' says Lawrence Lindsey, Bush's chief economic adviser. ''The evidence is that faith-based institutions are very efficient deliverers of public service and at actually helping people.''
Bush clearly thinks so. Highlighting a Minneapolis ministry that provides the homeless with meals and a spiritual message, he put it this way: ''Government cannot do this work. It can feed the body, but it cannot reach the soul. Yet government can take the side of these groups, helping the helper, encouraging the inspired.''
A second reason Bush likes the idea, says Marvin Olasky, a University of Texas journalism professor who has advised him on the issue, is that it ''allows different groups to try different things rather than going with the one size fits all'' approach of government-administered programs.
Olasky, author of ''Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America,'' is quick to note that Bush isn't endorsing one religion over the next. All would be eligible. And, he says, there would always be a secular alternative for service delivery.
To help those groups, Bush would allow individuals an above-the-line tax exemption - which would reduce one's taxable income in the same way an IRA contribution does - for charities of their choice. He would also allow them to direct part of their tax payments as contributions to those charities.
The trade-offs? The first is obvious: Bush's plan would further erode the wall between church and state, with all the concerns that entails. But an equally knotty issue is how to distinguish between religious organizations. Focus on results, says Olasky. And if a cult has the best results? That question remains unanswered.
Communitarian, not libertarian
These are two divergent streams of modern American conservatism. The libertarian thrust, most closely associated with Western conservatism, is best expressed by a desire to get government out of the way. In 1980, Ronald Reagan paid campaign-trail tribute to that idea, asking, rhetorically, how long it would take for people to notice if the federal government simply disappeared.
Bush, with his plans to direct federal dollars to private organizations to pursue social functions, has plotted a different course: using government to strengthen civil society.
That's the prevailing current of today's conservatism - and if faith-based groups and charities work as billed to strengthen society, the upside is obvious. But other conservatives raise a second objection: Government may weaken the very groups it hopes to harness for social good.
''If you want strong, dynamic, vigorous private organizations to solve social problems, you need to keep them private,'' says David Boaz, author of ''Libertarianism: A Primer'' and executive vice president of the Cato Institute. ''Giving them government subsidies makes them soft and dependent and subject to regulation.''
