The Leadership Thing

By Richard Brookhiser

In a dozen subtle ways, George Bush has spent the past year and a half distancing himself from Ronald Reagan. His White House press room is used for press conferences, not games of hide-and-seek; his First Lady prefers gardening in slacks to hostessing in a designer dress. Even the phrase "kinder, gentler" was a covert, backward-looking rebuke: Kinder and gentler than who?

There have to be a few Bushmen, along about now, who are wondering if the process of de-Reaganization hasn't gone too far. With the tax switch clinging to their cheeks like the remnants of a burst globe of bubble gum, they must be asking themselves, Would the Gipper ever have got into such a mess?

Of course he wouldn't. Reagan got into different kinds of messes, but his leadership style precluded embarrassments quite like this one.

The Reagan style was made up of three elements, the first and most obvious located at the point where warmth intersects rhetoric. Reagan's rhetoric was crafted by flacks, and the warmth may not have warmed anyone within actual touching distance, apart from Nancy, but from a podium or in front of a lens, the combination was overpowering. Reagan, said Tip O'Neill in a moment of frustration, could win an election with the votes of a group of bankrupt farmers. O'Neill, no mean blarneyer himself, was paying homage to a master.

What energized that compelling performance was the fact that the performer had something to say. Critics mocked The Speech, that cargo of truisms worn to stream-bed smoothness after decades of delivery, but the solidity, and the consistency, of Reagan's basic message acted as political ballast when many another career capsized.

It helped, finally, that Reagan turned out to be right about so many things. He cut tax rates, in the teeth of predictions that the sky would fall, and it's still over our heads. For half a century he disliked communism -- no more, it turns out, than Chinese students, Lithuanian voters or many of Mikhail Gorbachev's advisers.

In the day-to-day world of politics, the fusion of style, conviction and prescience had the paradoxical effect of giving Reagan flexibility. When Reagan seized the opportunity, late in his second term, to negotiate American intermediate-range missiles out of Europe, he provoked far less anguish among his movement conservative supporters than Richard Nixon did when he went to China. Reagan, unlike Nixon, had a reserve fund of trust, and he drew on it. A more pertinent example of a low-cost Reagan switch comes from his days as Governor of California. Reagan, as part of his general opposition to high taxes, believed that taxpaying should be an obvious and unpleasant activity -- "Taxes should hurt" was a favorite slogan -- and he was therefore opposed to state income tax withholding, a position on which, he said, "my feet are in concrete." When, after a few years in Sacramento, he found that the state could not generate a livable cash flow unless withholding was instituted, he unlocked himself -- and announced the change by saying "the sound you hear is the concrete around my feet cracking." Supporters saw the switch not as a defeat or a betrayal, but as a maneuver that was necessary to fight and win another day. So did Reagan, who returned to the tax issues at the end of his second term as Governor (unsuccessfully) and his first term as President (successfully).

Bush has none of these qualities. His rhetoric is small timbre, a church- basement upright, not a concert grand. He is identified with no lifelong, strongly held principles or prejudices. And since he hasn't been telling us the same thing for years on end, he can't have the pleasure of telling us now, "I told you so."

Bush's strength as a public figure has always resided elsewhere. In Looking Forward, his campaign autobiography, he told the story of the Yale headgrounds keeper who, after weeks of watching Bush swinging and missing in the batter's box, wrote him a note: "I am convinced the reason you are not getting more hits is because you do not take a real cut at the ball. If you would put more power behind your swing, you would improve your batting average 100%." Bush added that he took the advice, and brought his average up over .250. This story has been retold as a goof on Bush: no bat then, no oomph now. But it ) cuts two ways, for Bush put in the work and did improve himself.

This quality of earnest effort has been Bush's long suit. He may not always know what to do, and he may never know how to say what he knows. But once he resolves to do something, he plugs away.

Such a public personality is especially vulnerable to the kind of failed smart-guy trick the change on tax policy represents. Bush cannot say that as a longtime antitax ideologue he has nevertheless decided to take one step back in order to go two steps forward. He does not have the cushion of principle to fall back on. All he had was a pledge, and the character of a man who kept his pledges. Now he has welshed on the pledge and is in danger of losing the character.

Bush is doubly vulnerable to conservative disgruntlement. The Congressmen and pundits who are so unhappy now were never tied to him by the mystic chords of memory, as they were to Reagan, though they were willing to be pleasantly surprised. Now they have been unpleasantly confirmed in all their old doubts. This matters to Bush because they, not George Mitchell or Tom Foley, form the core of his support.

Though the Democrats will certainly profit by Bush's discomfiture, whether they will be able to build some positive political advantage upon it is another question. (We are not talking about the most cunning people on earth.) The popular estimate of Bush may stay high. But it's peaked because he's changed, and the only way from here, for the estimate and the man, is down.