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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 18

PRESIDENT BUSH

The Fight of His Life


As he embarks on his last campaign, George Bush calls in an
old friend to help him come from behind. Jim Baker now must
do what so far Bush has not: explain exactly what the President
stands for and what he would do with four more years.

By DAN GOODGAME


    Playing singles, George Bush seldom won on the tennis
courts of the Houston Country Club, even back in the early '60s,
when he was young and fast. He had no backhand, and his serve
was worse -- "the falling leaf," he called it. But Bush
compensated. He chose as his partner a lawyer from a
distinguished Texas family, who just happened to have been
captain of the varsity team at Princeton. With the polished
James Addison Baker III at his right side, the southpaw Bush was
able to emphasize his strengths: his forehand, quick reflexes
at the net and steadiness on the clutch points.

    Together, Bush and Baker became men's doubles champions,
and from that seed grew one of the most successful partnerships
in American politics. As Bush observed last week, when he
announced that Baker would resign as Secretary of State to
replace Sam Skinner as his chief of staff, "He's the sort of man
you want on your team." Make that running your team. Baker will
direct not only the White House but also the Bush campaign, and
will continue to oversee foreign policy, wielding such broad
influence that some officials call him "Deputy President."

    This week, as if replaying a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis
road movie, Bush and Baker return to the scene of their
earliest defeats and triumphs: Houston, site of the Republican
National Convention, where the two old friends will launch their
last campaign together. But they will have little time for
nostalgia. Arrayed against them are obstacles greater than any
they have faced in their three decades as a team. The economy
continues to sputter, with unemployment stuck near 10% in the
major industrial states and consumer confidence in a funk. The
President trails Democrat Bill Clinton by 25 points in national
polls. Many Republican lawmakers, frightened by local surveys
that show Bush dragging them down, are skipping the Houston
convention. And the G.O.P. is ideologically riven -- over issues
from abortion to supply-side economics -- as it has not been
since 1976, when President Ford, weakened by a primary fight
against Ronald Reagan, lost to Jimmy Carter.

    Democrats naturally viewed Bush's yanking of Baker back to
the White House as a spasm of desperation. Republicans,
however, took heart at Baker's move, for they consider him the
only man who might save Bush and their party. Ken Duberstein,
who served as Ronald Reagan's last chief of staff, quipped that
"Baker can't walk on water, but he knows where the rocks are."
A highly organized and disciplined manager, Baker is expected
to quickly shape up the White House and campaign staffs, which
have piled up "counselors to the President" and "senior
strategists" like layers on a compost heap. He is taking his own
core staff of four seasoned political operatives from the State
Department, and he will hack through tangled lines of authority
by working with such trusted, longtime allies as campaign
chairman Robert Teeter and Budget Director Richard Darman.

    Another Baker strength is his crisp decisiveness. Says Ed
Rogers, an adviser to the Bush campaign who worked with Baker
in 1988: "He puts periods at the end of all the sentences."
Baker can make his decisions stick, through what campaign
manager Fred Malek calls his "unique authority" as Bush's best
friend and architect of his 1988 landslide victory. That
authority also allows Baker to speak bluntly with Bush: to bring
him bad news and to tell him, as Baker once put it, "George,
you're screwing up."

    The most common criticism of Baker is that he, like Bush,
doesn't believe in much beyond his own ambition. "He's very good
at making the trains run on time, but I'm not sure he knows
what the boxcars should carry," said Bill Bennett, the
conservative former Cabinet Secretary under Reagan and Bush. "I
guess that means this campaign is going to be about competence,
not ideology," Bennett wryly added, adopting a line used in 1988
by Bush's Democratic rival, Michael Dukakis.

    Baker, however, moved swiftly to appeal to reform-minded
conservatives, endorsing their agenda to "empower" people to
"break away from dependency" and "make their own choices" in
education, health care and housing. In his farewell speech at
the State Department, Baker added that "we should build on the
fundamentals of lower tax rates, limits on government spending
[and] less economic regulation.'' A conservative
Administration official praised Baker's text as "a big part of
the speech we've been waiting for the President to give."

    A campaign official described Baker's task as twofold: "To
show that George Bush can do better at home and that Bill
Clinton would be much worse . . . a risk we can't afford." The
campaign will escalate its tarring of Clinton as a slick,
untrustworthy, tax-and-spend liberal who panders to blacks, gays
and "radical feminists." But Baker is also moving to articulate
the affirmative rationale that Bush's candidacy has lacked,
partly by recovering what Congressman Vin Weber of Minnesota,
a Bush campaign co-chairman, calls "our credibility on the
economy . . . to demonstrate that we are serious about change
and that we can actually accomplish it."

    That will require Bush to move beyond his standard lines
to the effect that the economy will fix itself, that the
recession is not his fault, that Congress will not pass his
"growth package," that Clinton would "make things worse."
However valid some of those explanations might be, said a Baker
ally, "the voters aren't buying excuses."

    Weber and others had urged that Bush appoint Baker "not
just as a political handler patching things up before the
election" but rather as "someone whose primary job is economic
and domestic policy." And that's exactly what Bush did,
declaring that Baker would develop "an integrated second-term
program of domestic, economic and foreign policies" and would
help him "seek a mandate to put this program into action."

    Republicans were cheered by that little word mandate,
which Bush has avoided in his past campaigns, preferring to
emphasize his personal qualities and resume over any specific
program. This time, Baker believes, Bush must show how he would
govern differently if he had a like-minded Congress and must
press the voters to give him that Congress. Struck by the
potency of Clinton's pitch that Bush "refuses to take
responsibility for the condition of the country," Baker will
stop Bush from sounding whiny and petulant when he blames
everything on Congress, on the news media and -- worst of all
-- on a public that, he often complains, does not appreciate
that the economy is improving.

    Baker's boldest initial move will be to have Bush
acknowledge implicitly that he has neglected domestic policy for
his first term -- and then to make a virtue of it. "Over the
past four years," Baker said, "the President saw a chance to
take on the two central problems of our age -- the struggle for
freedom and the threat of nuclear war -- and he seized it. No
apologies for that." He added, "I know what President Bush can
accomplish when he directs his resolve toward a purpose. We saw
it in the gulf. I think we will see it again, as President Bush
targets America." Around the Bush campaign, this message is
known as "the cold war pivot." Its intent is to capitalize on
the high approval ratings Bush still enjoys in foreign and
defense policy and to transfer that strength to the domestic
realm.

    Yet Clinton is already signaling that he will not concede
foreign policy primacy to Bush. After keeping Bush on the
defensive the past few weeks over his hands-off policy toward
the "ethnic cleansing" under way in Bosnia, Clinton used a
speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council last week to
attack Bush's diplomatic record. "In a world of change, security
flows from initiative, not from inertia," Clinton said. "The
notion that the Republicans won the cold war reminds me of the
rooster who took credit for the dawn."

    Republicans shrugged off not only that assault but even
Clinton's commanding lead in the polls, pointing out that when
President Ford made up a 31-point deficit against Jimmy Carter
in 1976, it was Baker who managed the general election campaign.
But as Baker knows, that story cuts both ways: Ford had lagged
Carter by 33 points. He still lost by 2.