Go, Bush! Remarks, and advice, from a skeptic.(Pres Bush)(Column)

Not long ago, I was asked to give my judgment on the early days of the George W. Bush administration and throw in some advice to the new president. Perhaps the editor in question recalled my contribution to a 1989 Wall Street Journal symposium in which we were asked what was the best thing that had happened in the first 100 days of the elder Bush. I boldly answered, "Lent."

On this occasion, however, I shrank from glory. My open-nay, flamboyant-criticism of George W. the Candidate disqualified me, I felt, from the advice-giving racket for a while. And besides, even the most attentive administration would hardly be likely to listen to suggestions from someone who had consistently treated its leader as a good mayor of Austin in a lean year.

It did occur to me a few months ago that I might work some useful mischief and destroy the prospects of liberal Republicans by enthusiastically endorsing them for jobs in the administration. Just as I was about to call for Christie Whitman to be made head of EPA, however, she got the job. And I lost the appetite for advice-giving.

There remains, however, a slightly more subtle and interesting question: Do conservative critics of Bush not owe him some sort of apology for underestimating him? Has he not been both more commanding and more conservative than we forecast? And is not his "compassionate conservatism" the potential philosophical foundation of a new political majority?

The Bush administration has certainly begun more impressively than most observers on all sides expected. In part this is because Bush is the kind of relaxed personality who is not afraid to surround himself with such highly experienced and competent politicians as Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Powell. The administration accordingly handled a crisis-the Hainan plane standoff- with forethought, deftness, and a disciplined self-restraint; its subsequent decision not to give Taiwan the Aegis system now, but to deliver it if Beijing increases the number of missiles aimed at Taipei, very neatly forces the Chinese to choose between avoiding escalation and taking the blame for an eventual Aegis sale. If this administration makes mistakes, they are less likely to be minor errors than serious and sustained misjudgments.

It is also a genuinely conservative administration. Of course, it is not as extravagantly conservative as the media regularly suggest. And the frequent suggestions by reporters that Bush is a calculating deceiver who disguised his cold conservatism during the campaign by being amiable to everyone merely reveal that they have a bias toward Gothic fiction as well as liberal politics. Even so, the administration has fought for a substantial tax cut (if an ill-judged one spread over too long a period); it has refused to sign the Kyoto treaty; and it has placed conservatives in senior positions throughout the administration. At the very least, Bush and his house Machiavelli, Karl Rove, appreciate that conservatives are an essential element in the Republican coalition and have to be kept reasonably content. That is a great deal more than his father ever understood.

As the current standing of Ronald Reagan demonstrates, however, the reputation of any presidency is likely to rest on the outcome of two or three major issues. In Reagan's case, these were the West's victory in the Cold War, the revival of the American economy, and the associated restoration of America's self-confidence in world affairs. Let me suggest that three issues, none of them at present in the headlines, will retrospectively determine how we judge the Bush presidency.