The Fight of His Life

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.