Right Out of the Picture : Conservatives Pushed Agenda, Got Eviction Notice Instead

Lord James Bryce, the perceptive British commentator on the government of the United States, once observed that in American politics nothing succeeds like success.

But Bryce, for all of his wisdom that has stood the test of time, did not anticipate the extraordinary spectacle of the century’s most conservative President triumphantly handing over power to an approved successor with only the most uncertain expectation of ideological continuity. And the appointees who might have played the role of vigilant guardians of the holy relics of conservatism are hardly to be seen in Washington.

But the plight of post-Reagan conservatism is more forlorn than even the absence of recognizable right-wing figures in George Bush’s Cabinet would indicate. Today’s most prominent figures are the very people who, in the eight years of the Ronald Reagan presidency, were the conservatives’ most consistent and bitter antagonists. Only three major figures might be looked to as keepers of the conservative flame--and they are in positions for which their qualifications are questionable and in which their success is problematical. These conservative point men are White House chief of staff John Sununu, Secretary-designate Jack Kemp of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Vice President Dan Quayle.

The most influential figure in this meager corporal’s guard of conservatives is Sununu. Bush’s renowned attachment to those loyal to him and his penchant for reciprocity are the principal explanations for this appointment. The President’s sense of obligation to Sununu for his political resurrection in New Hampshire is genuine, but the logic of assigning the cantankerous and doctrinaire ex-governor to this critical post can be likened to the decision by the mad Roman Emperor Caligula to make his favorite horse a consul.

The choice of Kemp is downright whimsical. HUD is the Chernobyl of the President’s Cabinet, a place where reputations can only be unmade. Kemp is a notorious blowhard who in Bush’s good, gray Cabinet will come across like Mick Jagger at a chamber-music concert. His pedantic lectures on monetary theory were dreaded in the Reagan White House. David A. Stockman, the former budget director, recalled in his memoirs that when Kemp got cranked up with one of his colloquia on the gold standard, members of the White House staff “were rolling their eyes and shifting around in their chairs as if from a sudden plague of hemorrhoids.”

The Administration’s most prominent but least influential conservative is Vice President Quayle. Tapped by the President as his emissary to the anti-abortion groups, Quayle will be forced to reconcile Bush’s equivocal views on that inflammatory issue with those of the movement’s most uncompromising zealots. It is an honor equivalent to being selected to head up a bomb-disposal unit.

How did conservatives evolve from their visible and vocal presence in the first years of the Reagan presidency to the endangered species they are today? And why aren’t they squawking about their headlong dissent into second-class citizenship?

The answers can be found in the internal politics of the Reagan Administration and the performance of the officials who wanted written into law the most hallowed conservative objectives. The problem with pushing that agenda was that those most temperamentally unsuited for the job were the conservatives. The tenure of most of these true believers was astonishingly brief, but the conflicts that they ignited often threatened to consume the Reagan Administration.

Richard V. Allen had a brief but stormy stint as national-security adviser and was forced to resign over an unreported gratuity. His successor, Judge William Clark, was so ill-informed about foreign policy that he could not identify by name some major foreign leaders, or which of our European allies opposed the stationing of nuclear weapons on their soil. Hopelessly out of his league in the job, Clark was moved over to the Interior Department to replace another failed conservative hotspur, James G. Watt. Watt, a formal inductee of the foot-in-the-mouth club, inexplicably banned the Beach Boys from a July 4 concert on the Washington Mall and commented with typical breeziness that one of his advisory commissions consisted of “a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple.”

Even more costly than Watt’s indiscretions were those of Patrick J. Buchanan, the White House communications director who wrote an unauthorized newspaper commentary article impugning the patriotism of Congress for refusing to vote military aid to the Contras. Buchanan’s action so antagonized lawmakers that support for the anti-communist resistance was severely undercut.

Bush may not have been in the communications loop on many of the critical issues of the past eight years, but it is a safe bet that he had ample opportunity to observe the convulsions that result when ideologues are given key posts in government. That wisdom is reflected in Bush’s choices for the top jobs in his Administration.

But if the conservatives are sullen, they do not appear to be rebellious. And how could they be? They have no place to go. Bush, who carries the Reagan benediction, is at this point all but unassailable. Realistic conservatives also know that Reagan carried conservatism to its most advanced point, and even he could enact only a small portion of their agenda. That felicitous phrase kinder, gentler nation constitutes an epitaph for the confrontational battle plan of the American right wing.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the dispossession of conservatives from the new Administration is that Bush’s fingerprints do not appear on the eviction order. That job was done for him by Reagan himself, who came to understand that conservatives were used best as window dressing while real power was placed in the hands of pragmatists. This has freed Bush to pursue undistracted his courtship of a Congress more enamored of deals than of dogmas.