The Heart Strategy

By JAMES CARNEY AND JOHN F. DICKERSON

George W. Bush is flying at 30,000 ft. and talking a mile a minute. Fresh from delivering a speech about health care for the uninsured, the Republican presidential candidate is moving briskly from topic to topic, from the wretchedness of entrenched poverty to the nation's lost faith in the individual to the '60s paternalism that he thinks caused it all--the attitude, he says, that "we can't trust poor parents to make a decision for their children." His hands reach out as he speaks. His eyes are animated, especially when the subject is education or the need to treat immigrants with respect. "This sounds like rote," he told TIME after unspooling a riff on how to improve schooling for the underclass. "It's not! It's what I believe! It's not somebody writing a speech for me. It's my passion!"

If it sounds as if George Bush is protesting too much, that's because he's got a credibility problem. It's hard enough being the leader of a party that has made headlines by shutting down the government and refusing to add a few quarters to the minimum wage. The Texas Governor also has his own recent past to overcome, including a bruising primary fight that featured him cozying up to the religious right and running a singularly uncompassionate campaign against his opponent, John McCain. Which explains why Bush has spent the month since McCain withdrew trying to resuscitate his "compassionate conservative" message by issuing a series of conspicuously centrist--some might even say liberal--policy proposals. And also why his aides insist, on what seems to be an hourly basis, that whatever Bush is announcing that day proves yet again that "he's a different kind of Republican."

The symbolism Bush employs can be just as orchestrated. The Governor rarely turns up in front of a camera these days without surrounding himself with African-American schoolchildren, Hispanic social workers, Catholic clergymen--or, as was the case last Thursday in Austin, Texas, gay Republicans. So it was in keeping with the script earlier in the week that after dropping by an adult learning center in a gritty west Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood and testing out his fearless, if primitive Spanish, Bush went around the corner to the West Side Ecumenical Ministry to announce a plan to help the working poor buy health insurance, make a down payment on a new home and build up personal savings. The price tag: a very un-Republican $42 billion over five years. "Our economy must also honor and reward the hard work of factory and field, of waiting tables and driving cabs," Bush told the largely Hispanic audience. "Not just enterprise, but sheer effort; not just technology, but toil."

Bush had barely finished his speech when Al Gore's campaign fired off a round of stinging critiques. "Governor Bush wants us to believe that he is committed to issues like education, health care and the environment," said the Vice President. "But saying it does not make it so. If he's a reformer, where are the results?" Bush brags about his record as Governor, promising the same success for the entire country, but Gore is pointing to a much grimmer Texas. On health care, which Bush largely ignored during his five years in office, Gore notes that the ranks of uninsured poor have increased during the Governor's tenure and that Bush tried to restrict the number of children covered by government-funded health insurance. In a befuddling reversal for a campaign so conditioned to cheering Bush's Texas record, a spokesman last week tried to deflect attacks on that record by saying the campaign would be focusing on the future and not the past.

But the future holds its own tough questions for the G.O.P. nominee as he tries hard to move to the political center. To back up his rhetoric, Bush is putting real money behind his compassionate proposals--a total of $59 billion worth of new spending over five years offered in the past three weeks alone. How will he pay for it? Bush has already pledged to sharply increase spending on defense while also offering a tax cut of $483 billion. He insists the projected surpluses will cover all these political IOUs. But actually installing the Bush program of tax cuts and caring will require the kind of fiscal discipline Washington has never displayed. If Bush does keep within budget boundaries, claim Democrats, he will be certain to cast aside his sweetness-and-light spending programs to fund a Bush tax cut that, as written, would most benefit higher-income Americans.

It is not at all clear the Bush program will help many of the working poor it targets. Offering a maximum benefit of $2,000 toward purchasing health insurance to families making no more than $30,000 a year, the Bush tax credit will in most cases fall well short of covering the whole bill. Out-of-pocket expenses for a family, depending on where it lives, may be several thousand dollars, still far more than the hard-pressed can afford. Bush advisers serve up some happy x factors to fill in the promise gap. Insurance companies, they say, will offer cheaper plans to accommodate this new pool of purchasers, and the Bush tax cut will allow families more money to spend on health care if they choose. Even a G.O.P. health-care expert who supports the Bush plan admits, "That's wishful thinking."

Despite all the criticism of his policy proposals, Bush is playing smart politics. The Gore camp seems to view Bush's struggle in the primaries as proof of his irreversible weakness as a candidate. But while Gore's campaign has remained static this past month--save for his almost universally derided pandering to the Cuban-American community over Elian Gonzalez--Bush's campaign has jumped aggressively into what aides say will be three solid months of policy-oriented speeches and events. First came two weeks of education initiatives, followed by his foray into health care and housing. This week Bush will propose another policy aimed at making home ownership more affordable. And in coming weeks, he will wrestle with the thorny issues of reforming Social Security and Medicare.

It's a strategy that concerns some of Gore's supporters. Will Marshall, head of a moderate Democratic think tank closely allied with the White House, calls Bush's willingness to propose activist government solutions to social problems "striking." Says he: "It's a real break with the Republican past." It's also a blatant bid to woo back the swing voters Bill Clinton was able to peel away from the Republican Party in 1992 and 1996. Adds Marshall: "Bush is trying to seize the ground of progressive reform that Clinton and Gore have occupied for most of this decade."

And it seems to be working. Not only has Bush opened up a modest lead over Gore in a series of national public opinion polls, but he's also holding respectable margins in key battleground states such as Ohio and Michigan. Last week Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, brandished a color-coded map of the U.S. that showed Bush running strong in normally safe Democratic states like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Washington. A primary reason, say pollsters, is that women seem to be responding to Bush's emphasis on issues like education and to his recent message of tolerance.

Whether or not the map and the theory are accurate, they have recharged the candidate's self-confidence. Indeed, Bush believes things are going so well that he predicts Gore's next move will be to copy him. "The difference between my campaign and his is that I'm going to stick to it, and if he sees me catching on, he'll change," the Governor told TIME as his plane approached the runway in St. Louis, Mo.

Gore has another campaign he plans to copy. His strategists like to cite the last time an incumbent Vice President ran against a Governor who touted his record as a new kind of moderate from a party with an extreme past. That Vice President came from behind, ran a cynical, negative campaign and crushed his opponent. It was 1988. The defeated Governor was Michael Dukakis. The victorious Vice President? George Bush.