COLUMN RIGHT / TOM BETHELL : A President Blind to Common Sense : Bush fails to use the one issue that can save him--the Perot and Clinton tax hikes.

The obsequious journey by President Bush’s entourage to Ross Perot’s headquarters provides yet more evidence that Bush remains a political babe in the woods, despite a lifetime in politics, and that the political skills of his chief of staff, James A. Baker III, have been grossly overrated.

The general idea was to try to win Perot’s support, which of course was not forthcoming. Bush’s people wanted Perot to know how much they agreed with him. The more sensible strategy would have been to let the electorate know what Perot really stands for, and to distance the President from that agenda.

The peculiar feature of Perot’s talk-show candidacy is that, although he has posed as an outsider who is fed up with business as usual, he now supports policies that appeal to the political Establishment. He might almost have secretly teamed up with the vaguely Republican Peter G. Peterson, secretary of commerce in the Nixon Administration, who (like Bill Clinton) thinks that tax increases cure budget deficits and who equates government spending with “investment.”

Instead of seeking to ingratiate themselves, Bush’s people might have drawn attention to Perot’s new political persona. The Texas billionaire’s economic plan supports by far the largest tax increase in U.S. history. For obvious reasons, Perot has not made this too conspicuous, referring evasively to “generating revenues” instead of raising taxes.

The overriding preoccupation of the political Establishment has been to keep talking about the budget deficit, thereby creating a climate of opinion in which tax increases seem inevitable. In his new incarnation, Perot is happy to oblige. It’s hard to believe that his “volunteers” were all along pining for a candidate who promises to divert more of their earnings to Washington. “Sharing the pain” has admittedly become a fashionable phrase. But did those volunteers really have in mind the following (advocated by Perot):

A new tax of 50 cents a gallon on gasoline; increased taxes on Social Security benefits; an increase in the top income-tax rate for individuals earning more than $55,000 a year; new taxes on employer-provided health care plans, and more. There would also be spending cuts--in theory. There is abundant evidence, however, that revenue increases encourage Congress to spend more, not less, and that the only way to restrain congressional spending is to choke off revenues (cut taxes), not add to them.

Perot himself must have been taken aback by the success of his latest round of publicity-seeking and by the fawning of his opponents. Groveling presidential emissaries tried to persuade him that Bush’s position was closer to Perot’s than Clinton’s was. The President who wanted to sound like Truman now wanted to sound like Perot. It would have made more sense for Bush to have held a press conference promising to avoid the big mistake (tax increases) that both Clinton and Perot were now on record as supporting.

The Clinton team’s trip to Dallas was more intelligible, because it really is in Clinton’s interest to keep Perot out of the race. Clinton is promising to raise our taxes less drastically than Perot, but the last thing he needs is a rival candidate appealing to the “deficit reduction” constituency. And like Perot, incidentally, Clinton also supports abortion. On what may be the two most important domestic issues of the campaign, therefore, Clinton and Perot have similar positions. If they are both in the race, they could divide the opposition to Bush, enabling him to survive for another four years.

The evident failure of Bush and Baker to see this explains why their reelection campaign is in trouble. They have so far failed to put the spotlight on the one issue that can save them. Almost certainly, most voters don’t yet know that both Clinton and Perot are promising large tax increases. The problem is, of course, that the current GOP leadership shares in the Establishment’s preoccupation with “the deficit.” For Bush and Baker, not to mention Budget Director Richard G. Darman and Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, it is downright irresponsible to recommend tax cuts when faced with a $350-billion deficit, and secretly they no doubt feel that tax increases are the “strong medicine” that we really need.

We live at a time when it is actually regarded as “demagogic” for a candidate to tell the people that, if elected, he will do what he can to see that they retain more of their hard-earned money. A candidate who promises that they will retain less of it is “responsible.” This, no doubt, is the true cause of the electorate’s discontent.

Bush has not shown any inclination to resist this inversion of common sense, which is why he is unlikely to be reelected in November.