Steering To Center Could Prove Fatal

Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s bold move to capture the philosophical middle and distance himself from conservative congressional Republicans not only strengthens his independent image but exposes the party’s far right wing as something of a paper tiger.

House Republicans screamed that Bush was undercutting their crusade to retain control of that body next year but there doesn’t seem to be much they can do about it. Bush is holding a powerful political hand and he is not afraid to use it.

He can get away with a lot in these days of heady polls, fantastic fund raising and weak opposition.

You can’t beat somebody with nobody. The religious right that has dominated internal Republican politics for 20 years has no single star to rally around this time. Too many insubstantial guys are out there espousing an identical ideology and chasing the same clump of voters. And the one major rival with real potential, Arizona Sen. John McCain, has few friends on the far right.

That’s why 20 of the 54 GOP senators, 23 of 31 GOP governors and 148 of 222 GOP House members have already endorsed Bush. They may be sorry now that Bush is proving to be his own man instead of theirs but it’s too late. They made their choice prematurely and they’re stuck with it.

Bush feels so confident of winning that he is already running a general election campaign, risking the ire of right-wing primary voters who are the party’s traditional base. This is nervy, because he is counting his chickens before the eggs have hatched. As one disgruntled Republican observed ominously, “He doesn’t have the nomination yet.”

Indeed, he deliberately broke the spirit of an earlier promise to GOP members of Congress that he would not campaign against them. The happy scenario of a unified party riding to victory on his coattails seems suddenly to be developing a tear here and there.

Having criticized his party twice in a week, Bush then backed off the confrontation by trying to mollify his angry targets. But if he meant what he initially said, it is an important development for his candidacy and the country. It was music to ears deadened by years of partisan cacophony over the role of the federal government.

Bush complained that his party has spent too much time “speaking a sterile language of rates and numbers. Too often my party has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself,” he said.

Hooray. This is the kind of common sense, centrist politics that President Clinton has practiced brilliantly and that is important to continue into the next century. When Clinton announced that the era of big government was dead - to be replaced by a smaller but still activist government - he moved public perceptions of the Democratic Party from the left fringes into the political mainstream.

If Republicans learned anything from the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, it should be that voters don’t think government is always the problem. They want basic services that only government can provide but they want them delivered fairly and efficiently, without ideological cant.

Bush is trying to pull his party away from the right, as Clinton pulled his from the left. Hopefully, this means the 2000 presidential campaign may focus on substantive issues of where the country is going, rather than the hateful wedge issues that preoccupy the zealots.

A classic example of this philosophical shift is Bush’s blunt rejection of the House GOP’s desperate scheme to stay within budget spending limits by delaying government payments to the working poor. “I don’t think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor,” he said.

The transparent gimmick was already dying. After Bush spoke, the wretched thing was finished.

Bush went further, denouncing a Republican tendency to take a sour view of our national standards and our culture.“Too often on social issues, my party has painted an image of America slouching toward Gomorrah,” he said.

He was repeating the title of a negative, carping book by Robert Bork, a Supreme Court nominee defeated in the Senate because of his nutty interpretation of constitutional rights. As much as anyone in public life, Bork symbolizes radical rightwing fringe thinking.

But Bush does not seem prepared to go much beyond what he said recently. He is not challenging the gun lobby or the anti-abortion crowd. He stands with his party in its basic objection to campaign finance overhaul. He wants to shave off the unpopular edges but not destabilize the Republican structure, which he must run on.

This is good thinking, so long as he remains the unchallenged front runner. If he falters, however, he may find that conservatives have long memories and a few teeth after all.