Two weeks ago, the Bush-Quayle campaign dispatched Gov. Carroll A. Campbell of South Carolina to Washington to bash Clinton, but when faced with questions about regulation, he had to fudge. Campbell at first said a Clinton administration would mean regulatory horrors. But then he had to admit that Bush-approved legislation meant huge regulatory increases--and he had to defend Bush's signatures on the bills. It was classic double-speak.
A second case in point: the budget deficit. Bush has called his own acquiescence to the 1990 tax hike "a mistake" But Bush and many of his advisers simply don't believe this. Budget director Richard G. Darman '64 strongly backed the compromise, as did Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady. It's true that some administration officials opposed the measure, but Bush himself bragged about it privately. One of his top aides told Japanese officials that the budget deal showed the Bush administration "knowing how to do the difficult things" on the deficit.
The point is that talk from Bush today about the need for change is not just politically asinine--it's not credible. Bush is a moderate politician who, like Clinton, believes in compromise to reach moderate solution--on taxes, regulation, civil rights, and in the Gulf War.
His view of politics--that it's "weird" and "strange"--contrasts sharply with that of his predecessor. Anthony R. Dolan, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Reagan speechwriter, put that president's philosophy best: "Ideas are the stuff of politics," he said.
When ideas form your conceptual framework of politics, you don't view the process as odd--you view it in clear terms of ideological conflict. George Bush ahs rarely been able to do that. His view of politics is precisely what Dolan said Reagan's was not: That it is "about meetings, conferences, phone calls, rules and decisions"--the mechanism of compromise and moderation.
Bush uses these tools extremely well, as we saw when he put together the anti-Saddam coalition. But when ideologies swing voters beyond concerns about who can best use these tools, Bush gets uncomfortable. Now he is left pleading with the public to judge which candidate they "trust" more with the instruments of governing.
The president, it is becoming increasingly clear, will lose this election. If any case, if Bush hopes to win, he must cast aside his fear and dishonesty about wanting change. And he must speak with strong conviction about what he does believe in and has been practicing--the politics of moderation.