Nagging Questions : Self-Denial by Bush Could Hurt Chances

WASHINGTON —  Soon after he started his second term as President Reagan’s understudy, George Bush called his top staffers together to emphasize one of the fundamental tenets of his vice presidency--the importance of not saying or doing anything that deviated from the White House line.

“I’m going to have to discipline myself and not talk to the press about what I believe and what my views are,” one of those present recalled Bush as saying. “I’m going to show you discipline, and I want you people to do the same thing.”

Largely because of his strict adherence to this first commandment--total loyalty to the President on every issue--George Herbert Walker Bush, 61, has made a very good thing out of the vice presidency, using it to establish himself as the early front-runner for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination.

Even conservatives, who initially viewed Bush with suspicion, in a recent survey named him more often than any other candidate as their choice for the nomination.

At the same time, however, Bush’s unhesitating accommodation to Reagan and Reagan’s partisans has raised nagging questions about whether the vice president has any bedrock beliefs or convictions that are distinctly and uncompromisingly his own.

Fairly or not, some analysts believe this perception--known in the harsh world of politics as the “wimp factor”--could ultimately have a devasting impact on Bush’s White House ambitions.

The character and personality of a candidate are uniquely important to voters when the Oval Office is at stake. For one thing, there is the awesome authority entrusted to any President, including responsibility for avoiding nuclear catastrophe. Moreover, as Brookings Institution fellow Stephen Hess, a former aide in the Eisenhower and Nixon White Houses, points out, personal strength and values are particularly critical for a chief executive because the influence of political parties has declined and because ideology has never mattered much to Americans.

“The question of strength of character is the most important question to be asked in the process of getting elected President,” Hess said.

Goes With Territory

Up to a point, Bush’s problem in this regard seems to go with the vice presidential territory. Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and many other ambitious understudies have seethed privately at the degree of self-effacement that goes with the vice presidency. John Nance Garner, who suffered in the shadow of Franklin D. Roosevelt, once dismissed the office as not worth “a pitcher of warm spit.”

Bush recently got a fresh taste of the grief vice presidential loyalty can bring when he announced he would call on Arab producers to help stop the decline in world petroleum prices--a decline that has hurt U.S. oil producers but helped millions of American consumers. Bush was apparently trying to convey a message of Administration concern for domestic producers, but when his comments provoked a torrent of criticism, White House officials quickly distanced themselves from him.

Such experiences have been common to all vice presidents, but in Bush’s case the problem was compounded by the fact that--unlike such predecessors as Johnson and Nixon--he has never established in the public’s mind a clear image of personal identity. While no vice president is ever truly independent, Bush’s surrender of self seems to have gone significantly beyond the norm.

Fundamental Issues

It was probably inevitable, for example, that--after losing his battle with Reagan for the 1980 GOP nomination and then joining the victory ticket--Bush should stop criticizing the President’s tax-cutting policies and became an overnight champion of the fiscal policy he had previously decried as “voodoo economics.”

But more striking was his shift on such fundamental issues as abortion and the equal rights amendment. No sooner had he been nominated vice president in 1980 than Bush dropped his support for the ERA and modified his opposition to a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion. He now says he is opposed to abortion except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is endangered--a position that differs only slightly from Reagan’s more rigid opposition to abortion.

Praises Reagan

And, along with a public demeanor that strikes some observers as overly effusive and contrived, Bush has moments of what comes close to self-denial. Addressing a Republican fund-raising luncheon in Philadelphia last month, he made a point of disparaging his candidacy for the presidency in 1980, when he competed fiercely against Reagan for the GOP nomination.

Ivy League Manners

“When I ran against Ronald Reagan, the smartest thing that ever happened was that people elected him and not me,” Bush told the Republican contributors. In a later interview, he declared: “I’ve learned a lot since then.”

Bush’s critics find in such attitudes and behavior ammunition for derision and even ridicule. Noting his Ivy League manners--Bush’s father was a U.S. senator from Connecticut and Bush himself was graduated from Phillips Academy at Andover and Yale University--political foes needle him as a “preppie.”

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau has lampooned the vice president cruelly, once depicting him as having “put his manhood in a blind trust.” More recently--and more seriously--conservative columnist George Will likened Bush to “a lap dog” and jeered: “He is panting along the Mondale path to the presidency.”

Pained by the Will column, Bush rejects all but a limited comparison with Mondale, who during his candidacy was often criticized as pusillanimous. “If you’re saying a former vice president, because he had been propelled into notoriety as vice president, managed to get his party nomination, that parallel is fine,” Bush said. “But if you’re suggesting that there is any other parallel, I don’t know what that is.”

‘Party Is Pretty United’

Mondale’s image suffered, in Bush’s view, because “he had to go to group after group and make pledges” to collect endorsements of his candidacy. “I don’t have to do that,” Bush said. “Our party is pretty united.”

On a more personal level, Bush’s friends and admirers contend that Bush’s own life and their knowledge of him refute the criticisms of his character. To rebut those who “try to write Bush off as a preppie,” Michigan Republican leader Brooks Patterson wears a tiny replica of the Grumman Corp.’s Avenger torpedo bomber--the plane Bush had shot to pieces under him when, as a World War II Navy pilot, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross.

In contrast with Bush’s critics, former New Jersey Sen. Nicholas Brady, a Bush confidant and longtime family friend, finds in the vice president “a feeling of competency” and “quiet evenness.”

Brady recalled the time not long ago when he and Bush were caught in heavy seas aboard a 36-foot motor launch off Florida: “The damn waves were eight feet high,and everybody else’s eyes were big as saucepans. But it didn’t seem to bother Bush at all.”

Another Bush adviser, speech writer Victor Gold, looks back on the 1980 campaign for the nomination as evidence of Bush’s toughness and resilience. After Bush’s defeat in the New Hampshire primary, “his campaign was living on one lung,” Gold said. “He kept getting knocked down in six or seven states, but he kept getting back up and that’s how he got to be vice president.”

Vice President Limited

Finally, Bush’s defenders emphasize the inherent difficulty any vice president has in avoiding embarrassing positions. Most of the time, a vice president is limited to saying things the President has already said. And on occasion, when he ventures forth somewhat on his own, he runs the risk of having the White House cut the ground out from under him.

That’s what seems to have happened to Bush when he announced, immediately before leaving on his just-concluded Middle East trip, that he would ask Saudi Arabia to help stabilize the plummeting price of petroleum in world markets.

The remark contributed to a tumble in the stock market and invited a torrent of criticism that Bush, a former congressman from oil-oriented Texas, appeared to be imploring the OPEC nations to raise the price of oil against the interest of most American consumers. White House spokesman Larry Speakes took pains to say the Administration remained in favor of a free market in petroleum. Although President Reagan loyally defended Bush in his press conference last week, the vice president was left to deal with a potentially damaging political brush fire.

Editorial cartoonists had a field day. The Washington’ Post’s Herblock depicted the vice president carrying a sign stating: “Please raise the price of oil again,” with a suitcase bearing the legend: “Groveling George: Have kneepads, will travel.”

Bush’s remarks were not well received in Michigan, where the process of picking Republican convention delegates begins this summer and where cheap oil helps both the auto industry and homeowners. The Detroit News labeled him “J. R. Bush,” an allusion to the unscrupulous oil tycoon character in the “Dallas” TV show, and headlined its editorial on his comments: “Bush to Michigan: Drop Dead.”

Oil Industry Connection

One GOP campaign consultant said of the incident: “It plays up one of the weaknesses in his background, his oil industry connection.”

But whatever problems the future may hold, Bush and his supporters point out that so far he appears to be doing very well politically.

“I don’t know how you measure progress (toward the nomination), but I feel very good about it,” Bush said during a recent visit to Pittsburgh.

And although much can change in the more than two years remaining before the next Republican National Convention, right now most opinion surveys and politicians--even unfriendly ones--tend to support Bush’s judgment.

In a poll early this year of rank-and-file conservatives--considered the most potent group in the GOP nominating process--more than 36% named the vice president as their first choice to succeed Reagan. Only about 17% backed Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), the conservative idol who was Bush’s runner-up.

Search for an Alternative

Complained New Right leader Howard Phillips, head of the Conservative Caucus, a national grass-roots lobbying organization, who is searching for a conservative alternative to Bush: “No one can criticize Bush without criticizing Reagan.”

Certainly Bush basks in the reflected glow of the President’s political success. “One half of the greatest leadership team we’ve ever seen in this country” is the way Tennessee Rep. Don Sundquist introduced him at a recent Young Republican Leadership Conference luncheon in Washington.

And since the 1984 election, Bush has been preparing for his own presidential candidacy in 1988, chiefly by setting up a political action committee called the Fund for America’s Future, which already has raised $5.6 million. The money is used to pay salaries of the PAC’s own staff in Washington and in the field, to cover political travel costs for Bush and his entourage, to contribute directly to Republican candidates for office and to raise more funds.

Helpful Exposure

Although the PAC is limited under federal law to supporting the campaigns of other candidates, it is obviously giving Bush plenty of helpful exposure by financing his visits to politically important states, notably Michigan.

Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Bush talked like a candidate. “I think I know what I’m going to do,” he said, adding that the best course for him is “just do your job, do the best you can.”

The vice president declined to say how his message in 1988 would differ from Reagan’s positions, but he told a questioner: “ . . . if I decided to run . . . I’d say . . . here’s what we’ve been doing to get through 1988, it’s had my full support. And now we’re moving into a new decade and here’s what I’m going to emphasize.

“I feel no compulsion right now to satisfy those critics that are suggesting there’s no message. My message is the message of this Administration, and I happen to think it’s a positive message.”

Personal Relationships

His comments Sunday reinforced the perception that even after his anticipated presidential campaign is formally launched, Bush will not let the world learn from him about any differences he might have with Reagan.

“I can’t go back and look over my shoulder and say I really wasn’t in on this decision. Or this one, if they had asked me, I wouldn’t have done that. I can’t do that to the President,” he said in an interview.

Bush’s career appears to owe less to ideological convictions than to personal relationships, which, friends say, have been the driving force in his climb to the vice presidency.

“I make friends,” Bush said. “I believe in ‘hands on.’ I believe in staying in touch with people. And I learn from them. Loyalty goes two ways, to them and from them. I pride myself on that.”

Among themselves, Bush associates joke about “George Bush’s 1,000 closest friends,” Brady said.

Constant Roaming

And as Bush almost always does in his constant roaming--he has visited 20 states in the last 60 days--when he speaks on “political action,” he talks in terms of personal relationships rather than issues.

One result of this approach is that Bush has staked a strong claim upon the loyalties of many GOP regulars, who tend to see him as a man who has earned the right to carry the party banner in 1988.

“I know for a fact certain how I got where I am,” he tells the audiences of GOP activists, many of whom now see Bush as a man who has paid his dues and earned the right to carry the party banner in 1988. “I got there through a lot of help from people who weren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and get behind a candidate and do grubby precinct work.”

All that Bush knows for certain about his future is that it holds a great deal more grubby political work as he strives for the nomination--and, if he wins it, for the presidency itself. He also knows that no incumbent vice president since Martin Van Buren in 1836 has been elected immediately to the presidency.

As for the criticism that his identity has been submerged in his job, Bush said: “I don’t feel underappreciated or underidentified. I don’t feel any compulsion to have a dramatic announcement or unveiling, to jump out of a cake and say, ‘Here’s the real me.’ I think it’s very good to be Ronald Reagan’s vice president.”