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August 9, 1992, Page 001001Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives

At almost every campaign stop these days, President Bush blames Congress for the nation's problems: the weak economy, the poor state of public schools, crime and violence and urban decay.

On Capitol Hill, meantime, the President is attacked daily from all directions. Liberal Democrats accuse him of pandering to the wealthy. Conservative Republicans say he has no principles. And moderates in both parties maintain that he has failed to offer the programs or to provide the leadership that the times require.

These are the political signs pointing to a reality of the Bush Presidency. Rarely in modern American history, say scholars and politicians in both parties, has the relationship between the President and Congress been as sour and the legislative product as meager.

"Is there one member of Congress who would stand up for him in a pinch? I doubt it," said Terry Eastland, a policy strategist in the Reagan Administration who has just completed a book about Presidents and the Presidency.

Mr. Bush's budget director, Richard G. Darman, speaks of a "ritual of confrontation" that has frozen the legislative process. Republicans and Democrats argue over who is to blame, but this extraordinary deadlock has sparked a national debate over the merits of "divided government" in which different parties control the Congress and the White House.

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Mr. Bush has had some legislative successes, particularly in foreign policy but also occasionally in the domestic area. On balance, however, whether through his own fault or Congress's, he has had a harder time getting his way on legislation than any other President elected since World War II.

With little money to spend because of the large Federal deficit, he has put forward a wide range of domestic policy proposals dealing with Government spending, health, crime, energy, education, banking and many other topics. But they have been offered without passion, without a connecting theme, without any ranking of priorities, and Mr. Bush has hardly lifted a finger to build public support for most of them or to get them enacted.

When Mr. Bush has spoken out, he has emphasized narrow, symbolic steps like tax breaks for wealthy investors, tuition subsidies for students in private schools and an expansion in the number of Federal crimes punishable by death -- measures he knows the Democratic Congress will reject. And when Congress has tried to take matters into its own hands, in areas like parental leave, civil rights, minimum wage and campaign finance, he has been quick to veto.

"I wasn't elected to do it the way liberal Democrats that control Congress want, so I've had to stand up to them," Mr. Bush said in an interview in June with The New York Times.

Congress has responded in kind. In some cases, it has ducked responsibility, as in its refusal to approve essential new money for the savings-and-loan bailout, an ostrich-like position that avoids politically unpopular votes but is costing taxpayers as much as $6 million a day.

In other instances, Congress has sought simply to embarrass Mr. Bush politically, as in its insistence on a surtax on annual incomes of more than $1 million. This proposal is not intended to raise revenue so much as to taunt the President.

Politically, the deadlock has damaged both sides. The latest New York Times/CBS News Polls show that only 30 percent of adult Americans approve of the way President Bush is handling his job, and only 20 percent like the way Congress is performing.

The roots seem to be deeper than the simple fact of divided Government, of a Republican President and a Democratic Congress, a lineup that has become the rule rather than the exception in the last 40 years.

"In other periods when there was partisan conflict," said Mr. Darman, who has served in every Republican Administration since Richard M. Nixon's, the President and Congress went through the motions of confrontation, but then "there was a kind of ritual of compromise that got something done."

But now, Mr. Darman said, "We've fallen into a ritual of confrontation that doesn't get things done." A Promising Beginning Offering a Hand To the Opposition

On the steps of the Capitol waiting for his inauguration ceremony to begin, George Bush looked down into the audience, spotted his old friend Dan Rostenkowski, the influential chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, waved conspicuously and shouted, "Hi, Danny!"

Many who witnessed the moment -- who watched Mr. Rostenkowski beam, who recognized Mr. Bush's knack for making meaningful personal gestures -- sensed a period of bipartisan cooperation in the offing. And Mr. Bush's Inaugural Address only heightened those expectations.

To those he called his friends in the loyal opposition, the new President declared: "I put out my hand. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Speaker. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Majority Leader. For this is the thing: This is the age of the offered hand."

And he went on to say: "Let us negotiate soon, and hard. But in the end, let us produce."

Mr. Bush, said a person who was on his staff then, thought that if lawmakers liked him personally, they would side with him politically. He kept a locker in the House gym. He invited countless senators and representatives, their families and even their favored constituents to the living quarters of the White House for small talk and photos. He wrote scores of friendly notes. Largest Opposition Ever

But he had misjudged the situation. Democrats had gained Congressional seats in the 1988 election, and Mr. Bush took office facing the largest opposition majority in Congress of any newly elected President in history.

In addition, the overarching problem of the large Federal deficit meant that little money was available for popular new programs. Politicians can usually find ways to cooperate when there are funds to be divvied up, but their instinct is to pass the buck when belts must be tightened.

As if those obstacles were not enough, Mr. Bush made another miscalculation. In his first weeks in office, he pulled out all the stops to get the Senate to confirm John G. Tower, a former Senator from Texas, as Secretary of Defense, making phone calls and promises and taking the steps Presidents usually take when they really want something from Congress. But the nomination was rejected anyway, and this was a serious setback to the new President. (Mr. Tower died in a plane crash in April 1991.)

"He learned a lesson from the Tower fight," a White House official said. "Never again would he go to the mat -- I mean really go all out -- unless he knew in advance he would win." Sporadic Success Wielding the Veto To Shape Policy

Even in the face of those disadvantages, Mr. Bush has had some success in dealing with Congress, especially in his first two years in office.

He was quick to deal with the savings-and-loan debacle, an issue that had been swept under the rug during the 1988 campaign, and the plan he pushed through Congress in 1989 now shows signs of resolving the worst disaster in financial regulation since the Great Depression.

He also broke years of inertia, warded off criticism from business interests and the conservative wing of his party and struck a compromise with Congress over revisions in the Clean Air Act, achieving the most comprehensive and expensive environmental statute ever enacted. He also shaped and signed important legislation granting new rights to the disabled.

Mr. Bush won authority to negotiate a free-trade agreement with Mexico, got increased financing for Head Start and new money for farm and housing programs, and ended years of partisan dispute over United States policy in Central America. Just this week, he persuaded lawmakers to back a plan for aid to Russia and the other former Soviet republics. Flurry of Vetoes

Mr. Bush has also had extraordinary success wielding his veto power. So far, he has vetoed 31 measures and has never been overridden. Surprisingly he has never vetoed any bill on the ground that it cost too much money, a counterweight to his charge that increased Government spending is Congress's fault.

Sometimes he used the veto to get Congress to modify its position. For example, he vetoed a bill to raise the minimum wage to $4.55 an hour from $3.35, and then signed one that put the floor at $4.25.

Other times Congress refused to back down, and Mr. Bush ended up signing bills similar to ones he had vetoed. That was the case with civil rights legislation. And in the face of Congressional pressure and the recession, the President finally agreed to a measure extending unemployment benefits.

Several vetoes were cast on ideological grounds, like those on bills to lift the ban on Federal money for fetal tissue research or to relax restrictions on abortions. Other measures were vetoed for partisan political advantage, like those that would have made voter registration easier and permitted Federal workers to engage in partisan political activities, both of which were thought to benefit Democrats more than Republicans.

But mindful of his experience with the Tower nomination, the President only once vetoed a bill without knowing in advance that he had the votes to prevent Congress from overriding him, a senior staff assistant said.

The one exception was legislation put forth after the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989 that would have allowed Chinese students to remain in the United States after their visas expired. Mr. Bush felt it was an intrusion into his ability to conduct foreign policy. The House voted to override by a large margin, but the Senate fell four votes short of the necessary two-thirds' majority. The Budget War Capital Gains Bill Destroyed a Truce

Lawmakers say they can count on one hand the issues on which Mr. Bush went all out and took political risks to win his way in Congress. The Tower nomination and the veto override on the Chinese students are two. The resolution permitting him to go to war against Iraq is a third case, and the Clarence Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court is a fourth.

The fifth example is the budget.

A month after taking office, Mr. Bush sent Congress a list of changes he wanted in the budget prepared by the Reagan Administration. He spelled out spending increases in popular programs like education and space exploration and promised to offset the additional costs with spending cuts. But he never specified the cuts, leaving it to Congress to make the politically difficult choices.

This strategy, apparently devised by Mr. Darman, is one that Mr. Bush has embraced throughout his Presidency, not just on budget matters but in health care and many other areas: take sole credit for popular proposals, but force Congress to bear or at least share the blame for painful steps.

It is a strategy that infuriates lawmakers.

"When there's good news to report," said Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the Democratic leader, "the President would like everybody in America to think he has the power of a king. When there's bad news, he would like everybody in America to believe he has no power at all. It's the complete absence of any willingness to assert leadership and assume responsibility." Last Vestige of Cooperation

But in 1989, Congressional leaders did not want to fight a serious budget battle any more than the President did. They agreed with Mr. Bush that spring to a just-get-me-through-the-night budget that met the legal targets with gimmicks rather than real belt-tightening and that put off hard choices until the next year.

The truce did not last. As part of his deal with Congressional leaders, Mr. Bush had promised to forsake for the rest of 1989 his favorite tax proposal, a cut in the capital gains tax. But when the House of Representatives unexpectedly passed such a plan, Mr. Bush began fighting for it in the Senate.

There were clearly enough votes in the Senate to pass the bill; there usually are for any tax cut. But Senator Mitchell, a die-hard opponent of a capital gains tax reduction, used every parliamentary maneuver available to him as majority leader to prevent a vote, and the measure died.

Democrats were furious because they thought Mr. Bush had broken his word. The President was outraged because he could not get a vote when he had a clear majority on the domestic issue most important to him. The last vestige of cooperation had faded away.

"Things were never the same again," said a top Presidential adviser. "They thought the President was too popular, and they had to bring him down a notch."

By 1990, the deficit could no longer be ignored. For months, Administration officials and lawmakers negotiated to no avail. Mr. Bush stayed as far removed as possible. Congressional leaders say that Mr. Bush presided over every meeting they attended at the White House about the war against Iraq but that except for the opening session, he never attended a meeting on the budget.

Then, to get the talks off square one, Mr. Bush acceded in June to the Democrats' demand that tax increases be part of any budget deal.

Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, one of the President's closest friends, said Mr. Bush knew that reneging on his no-new-taxes pledge would cost him dearly in the public opinion polls. But Mr. Bush may not have understood how much it would cost him politically within his own party. Dozens of Republican lawmakers had taken the pledge themselves, and party loyalty be damned, they were not about to break it.

The President's relationship with the conservative wing of his party, always strained, was now broken. Faced with a large Democratic majority in the House and Senate, he could no longer count on the votes of lawmakers from his own party. The Leadership Issue Impulse to Avoid Fighting Congress

In President Bush's view, the failings of his Administration are due mainly to Congressional inaction and political meddling.

If Congress had cut the capital gains tax and had approved the rest of his economic program, the economy would not have performed worse in his term than in any other President's tenure since World War II.

If Congress had not initiated a political witch hunt, the public would pay no mind to charges that Mr. Bush tried for years to curry favor with Saddam Hussein.

If Congress would pay more attention to jobs and the economy, he would not have had to drag his feet in issuing environmental rules.

If Congress would stop harping on the notion that the best way to improve schools is to spend more money, his own ideas for education, like bolstering private schools, would be taken seriously.

If Congress had not forced him to raise taxes, his political standing would be much higher.

But others believe that the President was simply not interested in leading.

"This President doesn't like the idea of doing battle with Congress," said Representative Vin Weber, a Republican from Minnesota. "And he doesn't like the idea of mobilizing the country to get Congress to change."

Thomas E. Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution, who has written widely about the relationship between Presidents and Congress, put the case this way: "What Presidents are supposed to do is provide political cover, to help take the heat for difficult decisions that have to be made. They have the bully pulpit. They can shape public opinion. They can help members of Congress do the right thing.

"Bush never got involved in that aspect of the job." ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES

"The Bush Record" began June 25 with an interview with President Bush and an article assessing his leadership of the nation. The other articles explored his record on these issues: JUNE 26: Foreign affairs. JUNE 27: U.S. policy toward Iraq. JUNE 29: The economy. JUNE 30: Education. JULY 1: Judicial appointments. JULY 4: Environmental policy. JULY 28: Anti-drug policy. AUG. 2: Domestic social programs.

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