Bush's Other Summit

By CARL BERNSTEIN

Like Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush may have welcomed their rendezvous last weekend as a respite from problems at home. Just before the President departed for Helsinki, he ascended another summit, this one devoted to hammering out a plan to contain the exploding federal deficit.

The urgency of the task facing the congressional and White House budget negotiators, whom Bush left closeted at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, was alarmingly clear. Because of declining revenues from the weak economy, estimates of next year's budget gap are leaping into the stratosphere. Budget Director Richard Darman projects a shortfall for fiscal year 1991 of $250 billion, and some economists predict that if rising oil prices tip the U.S. into a deep recession, the figure could climb to $400 billion. If no agreement on the budget can be reached by Oct. 1, draconian spending cuts mandated by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law will go into effect, crippling every government agency from the Agriculture Department to the Pentagon.

That is a prospect so dire that neither side will allow it to occur. For the first time since the talks began four months ago, Democrats and Republicans both seemed more interested in working out a deal than in political posturing. Bush believes the crisis atmosphere arising from the showdown with Saddam Hussein may be the best, and last, chance to stampede the Congress toward a budget agreement.

Both sides remain publicly committed to their agreed-upon goal of cutting $50 billion out of the deficit next year as a down payment on $500 billion in reductions by 1996. But despite the burst of bipartisan determination, Bush is unlikely to be presented with an accord when he returns to Washington. As the talks began, Democrats suggested instituting a vaguely defined tax on energy and eliminating the income tax provision that reduces the marginal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans from 33% to 28%. Both ideas are anathema to Republicans, some of whom, like House minority whip Newt Gingrich, are calling for tax cuts to blunt the edge of a recession. G.O.P. leaders responded with a call for a cut in capital gains taxes, which Democrats adamantly oppose, along with higher levies on tobacco and alcoholic beverages and a $10,000 limit on individual deductions for state and local taxes.

By entering the talks himself, Bush hoped to pressure both sides to forge an agreement in time to announce it in a nationally televised address on Tuesday night. Failing that, he may use the speech either to blast those he blames for the impasse or to make a dramatic offer to break the deadlock. Not even his closest advisers could say which option Bush would take.

Bush's remarkable progress in welding together an international coalition to oppose Iraq's aggression has thrown into even higher relief the sluggish, indecisive pace he has set on domestic affairs since taking office. Lack of progress on the deficit is only one symptom of the governmental gridlock that has become the rule in Washington. Although both the House and Senate passed versions of legislation that would for the first time establish a national child-care system, the bill has been stalled in a conference committee. So has the Clean Air Act, which would curb noxious emissions into the atmosphere. Other important legislation on civil rights and campaign finance reform has been threatened with presidential vetoes or stymied by partisan squabbling.

Bush has been willing to take huge risks, make tough decisions, spend money quickly and put American soldiers in danger in the Persian Gulf. By contrast, his domestic posture has been low profile, low risk and largely ineffectual. Why is there this contrast in the President's performance?

The answer, in part, is that despite the higher stakes involved in a military venture, the President, Congress and the American people find it easier to embark on a foreign crusade than to agree on solutions to complex domestic problems. Any attempt to raise taxes or prune an established domestic program, no matter how costly, ineffectual or obsolete, raises howls of outrage from those it benefits. Bush is experienced and confident on international relations. The issue and the threat to U.S. interests in the gulf are clear. On domestic affairs, he holds few strong personal views. Having transformed himself from a progressive Republican into a Reaganite in order to become Vice President, Bush lost his policy compass. On the domestic scene, his strength has been politics, not ideas. Where there is no existing political consensus, Bush has been unwilling to expend any of his political ^ popularity in order to lead the nation.

"Bush has been terrific on the Middle East," says Joseph Califano, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. "But it's easier to deal with than the problems at home. It's more glamorous and exciting when you have Saddam or evil communism as the enemy. It's not that simple when, say, you've got a million heroin addicts, a massive crime problem, poverty, lousy education, no health care, urban decay, alcoholism."

The failure to address domestic issues is becoming especially ominous given the latest harbingers of hard times ahead and the inattention to the country's most corrosive problems: a national debt of $3 trillion, 30 million citizens who live in abject poverty, the highest homicide rate in the industrialized world and disgracefully failing schools. Such problems, says Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, are the real measure of what fighting the cold war cost the U.S. "For half a century we put all our best energies and best minds into the issues of the cold war, just as now in the gulf we are putting them into the first post-cold war crisis. The results of that disparity of energy are apparent all around us."

Why is there no outrage apparent in the country about the failure to deal with these harsh realities? Howard Baker, the former Senate Republican leader and White House chief of staff, speaks of "a lack of national will" to declare war on the more elusive enemies within. "You have immediate consequences if you let Saddam get away with a large share of the world's oil," he notes. "But it's not equally obvious to the American people that something terrible is going to happen if we don't reduce the deficit, or reform entitlements, or address the problems of education and drugs and crime." Roger Wilkins, the black writer and former Justice Department official, also detects a national bent for escape and relief in foreign adventure. "I think we can always be galvanized by the threat of barbarians," says Wilkins. "Our feelings about the Soviets, and now Saddam, weren't terribly different from the Crusaders' views about the infidels." And, says Wilkins, affluent whites are opposed to large public expenditures that might benefit the black and Hispanic underclass. Iowa Republican Congressman Jim Leach, widely regarded as one of the more intellectually gifted members of the House, cites "a weakness of character in American politics that has very professional, smart people isolating special-interest groups and pandering to their interests, putting them and their campaign contributions ahead of national interest."

John Brademas, the president of New York University and former House Democratic whip, bristles at Bush's contention that America has more will than wallet for domestic renewal. "We're still the richest nation in history," says Brademas. "We lack the will. We can afford to deal with our problems. Everybody has to sacrifice, but so far George Bush has not been willing to call for that. Iraq is less difficult." It is long past time for Bush to begin leading the nation as purposefully at home as he does in foreign affairs.

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington