Bush already has one vision: a back-to-basics campaign. He’s moving right and turning nasty at a time when many in his own party-including Barry Goldwater-think voters want something new, uplifting and inclusive. Price is only one of many veteran operatives who share Bush’s roots in the combative Nixon-Ford years, when the GOP’s “Us versus Them” style was honed. While Bill Clinton motors through the heartland with a cheerful middle-of-the-road message, Bush is conspicuously stroking the party’s conservative wing, echoing the cutting rhetoric of yore: anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-abortion. And he’s using time-tested slime-and-distance tactics. “They only know one way to run a campaign,” said James Carville, Clinton’s chief strategist. With Bush stalled 17 points down in a NEWSWEEK Poll, the question is whether this kind of campaign is too late, too openly to the right, too raw-or just too familiar-to work one more time.
Assuming that James Baker leaves the State Department soon to oversee the campaign, the transformation into a Nixon-Ford reunion will be complete. Nixon ‘72 alumni include Bush’s polltaker Bob Teeter and campaign chief Fred Malek. Baker managed Ronald Reagan’s 1984 win, but he originally won his miracle-worker reputation in 1976, steering Gerald Ford from some 30 points behind Jimmy Carter to a photo-finish loss. In that campaign, consultant Charlie Black was emissary to restive conservatives; he has the same job this year. Baker is expected to bring in his own team to “compost” those already in place, in the colorful White House phrase.
As recently as three months ago, Teeter was telling Bush he could count on a solid 40 percent “base” vote. No one believes that now. Bush is traveling to putative friendly territory-Jacksonville, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs-to shore up regional strongholds and boost his own spirits with what aides call “comfort station” stops. He spoke last week to defense contractors and disabled veterans. He had a high-profile audience with New York’s staunchly pro-life Cardinal John J. O’Connor. To the Knights of Columbus, Bush pledged his right-to-life allegiance and his support for a school “choice” plan that would subsidize parochial and other private schools. “I’m a little concerned that he has to do all this so conspicuous now,” said GOP consultant Eddie Mahe. “But he has no alternative. The base isn’t solid.”
Accordingly, next week’s convention won’t be the “big tent” revival meeting the late Lee Atwater might have hoped for, especially on abortion. Women will be prominently featured, even those known to be pro-choice, including Labor Secretary Lynn Martin. But they won’t talk about abortion. Bush operatives are prepared to steamroll approval of a pure anti-abortion platform, in part on the theory that conservatives can’t be won back any other way. Delegations are stacked with evangelical Christians and other reliable right-to-life forces. Pro-choice activists will fight, but will be visible primarily outside the Astrodome. The Bush game plan brought a stern warning from a knowledgeable student of GOP disasters. “Abortion is not something the Republican Party should call for the abolition of,” Barry Goldwater wrote. If Bush insists on a pro-life plank, the conservative patriarch warned, “the convention will go down in a shambles as will the election.”
Bush needs to rally GOP field troops, many of whom have doubted his chances and his competitive zeal. So his campaign is sending out surrogates like the legions of rocket-toting penguins in “Batman Returns” (page 30). Bush political director Mary Matalin created a flap last week by faxing to the media–and to the campaign’s 50 state coordinators–a juvenile attack designed to remind the world of adultery allegations that have hounded Clinton.
Matalin, who reveres the late Atwater, was unrepentant. Her significant other is Carville, of all people, the hardest of the Democrats’ own hardball players. She was chastised at the insistence of White House chief of staff Samuel Skinner (perhaps soon to be composted). But, with the full backing of campaign advisers such as Black, she conceded only that the “tone” of her fax attack might have “left the wrong impression.” In fact, she told NEWSWEEK, the fax was wildly popular with The Troops. “It’s a user-friendly document for the field,” said Matalin. “It’s not meant for the pointy-heads.” Non-pointy-head conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh devoted an entire hour of his daily radio show to the memo. And Bush gave her a friendly hug at a staff meeting two days after the document made waves.
Black, among others, admits that Bush dare not crow about his economic stewardship. “It’s too late to turn around voters’ perceptions about the economy,” he says. It remains an article of faith with Bush operatives that they can “unmask” Clinton and running mate Al Gore as big-government, tax-raising liberals who would only make matters worse. To sharpen the ideological contrast, Bush is likely to unveil a new, more draconian crime proposal and to veto some spending bills sent to him this fall by Congress.
But in Clinton he faces a skilled foe with a moderate record who is shrewdly occupying some conservative ground of his own. It’s Clinton, not Bush, who is vowing to cut 100,000 bureaucrats from the payroll and hold down medical costs-and who urged military action against the Serbs. Clinton is making progress in insulating himself from attacks on “values” and character. Though the NEWSWEEK Poll found voters more likely to regard Bush as the candidate who holds “traditional values,” they see Clinton as a leader more “concerned about the family.” “The truth matters,” says Carville, “and people are fed up with the way they’ve run these campaigns.”
Even Bush insiders acknowledge that he needs a rationale for a second term more stirring than the notion that he’s the Devil We Know. Many top Republicans hope Bush will bring Baker back not only to run the campaign but to stay on as a domestic-policy czar-in effect promising a fresh start on a “new American order” to match the “new world order.” There are some who fantasize that Bush will use such a staff shift to maneuver Vice President Dan Quayle off the ticket. The problem with these pipe dreams: Quayle won’t budge, Baker doesn’t want to do it and the same conservatives the president is wooing view Baker as establishment evil incarnate.
In the end, staff shake-ups won’t do the trick. After 30 years in politics, George Bush can no longer win merely by saying, as he once did, that he’ll “handle whatever comes up.” Too many voters think he’s doing a lousy job at that. A lifelong accommodator, compromiser, fixer of the day’s problems, Bush will finally have to tell the nation what moves him and what kind of America he envisions. That’s where Price comes in. In 1968 he helped Nixon craft his stunning acceptance speech in Miami. In that famous “train in the night” address, Richard Nixon managed to evoke his own Quaker childhood to convey his concern for a nation torn apart by riots, assassination and war. If Price could pull it off for that problem-fixer, maybe he can do it for this one.
If the election were held today, whom would you vote for: 37% Bush 54% Clinton Which candidate do you think: Holds traditional values 50% Bush 33% Clinton Believes in prayer and religion 49% Bush 26% Clinton Cares about people like you 29% Bush 56% Clinton Shares your views on abortion 32% Bush 47% Clinton NEWSWEEK Poll, Aug. 6-7, 1992
