Is Bush Getting a FREE RIDE?

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON

BILL CLINTON HAS ENDURED A MERciless beating on his way to the Democratic nomination. The Arkansas Governor has been grilled on marital infidelity, draft dodging, pot smoking and conflicts of interest, and the going may get even rougher if he faces George Bush in the fall campaign. Clinton has talked himself hoarse trying to explain his way through the thicket of nettlesome questions and get back to discussing the political and economic issues that he hopes will help him topple an unpopular incumbent. All he needs is a level playing field, say Clinton's aides; but so far, they complain, Bush has been spared the relentless probing that has kept their man off balance. "It's been all double standard," fumes one campaign insider. "Our guy gets slammed and Bush escapes the same kind of scrutiny."

Have the press and the public been giving Bush a free ride? Yes and no. It is true that he has not been subjected to the same intense glare as his opponent, but sitting Presidents rarely are. While challengers can spring from nowhere with nothing more than ambition on display, Presidents are far better- known quantities. Bush, who has already served 11 years as President and Vice President, is a more familiar figure than most incumbents. On the other hand, Bush has been questioned over the years on a number of sensitive issues -- ranging from his family's business dealings to his role in the Iran-contra scandal.

Most of the charges leveled at Bush in the past have been short on evidence; many are irrelevant to his conduct as President. But as the campaign intensifies, the Democrats will surely see to it that old and new barbs are hurled in his direction. And if some of them stick, it won't simply be because they call into question Bush's character. It will be because four years in the White House have transformed Bush's carefully managed image as a square- shouldered Dudley Do-Right into something closer to the Flimflam Man.

Many of the familiar claims against Bush are off target. It is doubtless embarrassing to the President to hear his brother Prescott questioned about his work for West Tsusho, a firm with ties to the Japanese criminal underworld. But it is wrong to think that such activities tell us any more about George Bush's character than the shenanigans of Billy Carter told us about Jimmy's. On the contrary, the thin quality of these brother's-keeper charges may actually have underscored the perception that the President has uncommon good sense.

More damaging -- but still largely beside the point -- are suggestions that because Bush's children were involved in business deals that required federal bailouts, Bush is somehow to blame. There is little doubt that the Bush children have shown appalling judgment in business matters. Neil Bush became a national symbol of the S&L debacle in 1988 when he served on the board of the Silverado Banking, Savings & Loan Association, a Denver thrift that went bankrupt and then cost taxpayers $1 billion to recapitalize. Silverado's problems had worsened after Neil Bush and other directors approved bad loans to a businessman who had invested in Neil's oil-exploration firm. The inexperienced 30-year-old should have guessed that his partners might have wanted only to use his famous name as collateral.

Neil's brother Jeb teamed up with a business partner to buy a Miami office building in 1985, using $4.5 million from a Fort Lauderdale investor who had borrowed it from a Florida S&L. When that investor defaulted on the loan and the S&L became insolvent, the Federal Government bailed it out and in effect forgave part of the loan. That the Federal Government in the end collected only $505,000 of the $4.5 million from the Bush partnership only furthered the sense that Bush's children enjoy special advantages that others do not -- and then get bailed out by Uncle Sam when their deals go sour.

If Bush can be blamed for any of this, it is only for reluctance to provide advice to his children when they ask for it -- a habit that exasperates them to this day. Otherwise, Neil and Jeb were merely following the example of their father who, during his now romanticized "wildcatting" years in West Texas, lent a well-known name to unknown men with big ideas and bigger money. None of this is particularly relevant to Bush's conduct as President or to the 1992 campaign, since voters are unlikely to visit the sins of the sons upon the father.

Where Bush himself has recently shown poor judgment is in naming a privately paid Washington lobbyist and a public relations consultant to top campaign jobs without asking them to sever their ties to foreign companies and large U.S. firms. Both senior adviser Charles Black, a lobbyist, and deputy campaign manager James Lake, a p.r. man, have recused themselves from White House discussions of subjects that might affect their clients. The law does not require this of campaign workers since they are private, not public, employees. But, according to a Bush spokesman, both men remain on the payroll of their firms while working full time at the campaign.

The President is putting his personal ambition above his vaunted code of ethics when he overlooks the fact that when lobbyists enter the inner sanctum of White House meetings -- and both Lake and Black meet weekly with the President -- their perceived value to clients increases. A lobbyist who sits in on White House meetings always gets his phone call returned; a consultant who hands out his card to business executives knows that it carries extra weight with potential clients when it is distributed at Bush-Quayle headquarters.

Black's and Lake's presence on the campaign team saddles Bush with a liability, and White House officials fear that Clinton will eagerly exploit the issue in the fall. Last week White House counsel C. Boyden Gray and other senior officials were working behind the scenes to get Black and Lake to break away from their lobbying firms. "The job of a lobbyist is to influence the government," said a senior official. "It is not appropriate to have a substantial position in the campaign and to stay connected with ((clients)) who are trying to influence the government."

More worrisome are lingering rumors that the President once had an extramarital affair. In 1987 eldest son George W. Bush informed Newsweek that he had asked his father about adultery and had been told that "the answer to the Big A question is N.O." That blanket denial put the issue to rest during the last campaign. But questions about Clinton's alleged infidelity, which have become something of a humorous refrain in the Bush camp, have brought such matters back into the public domain; it may be only a matter of weeks before Bush is directly asked about his own past.

If and when it comes, the query will put Bush in a difficult spot. Any % answer he gives would serve as a green light for news outlets to investigate more fully Bush's handling of a relationship with a former employee. Many reporters, after all, believe that while it may be improper to track down rumors of adultery, it is acceptable to investigate possible lies about it. Such a feeding frenzy by the press could undermine Bush's plan to campaign heavily on the idea that he is more in touch with the "family values" of most voters than his Democratic counterpart.

Bush warned top campaign officials in writing two months ago that they would face "termination" unless they stayed, as he recently put it, "out of the sleaze business." But the line between sleaze and hard-nosed campaigning is difficult to draw, and there is little indication that Bush's no-first-use doctrine has received wide distribution among his campaign staff. As one senior adviser to the campaign said last month, "We are going to paint Clinton as a man out of control, who can't control his zipper, can't control his wife and can't control his waistline."

Though Bush may feel safe from that kind of personal attack, he may prove vulnerable to charges leveled at his political character. There is little evidence that any clearly defined beliefs or principles have guided his conduct in office. Doubts on this score may help explain why, according to a recent Gallup poll, 49% of the voters disapprove of his performance.

Constancy has not been a hallmark of Bush's political style. His position on taxes, for example, is a monument to political expediency. In 1980 he opposed Ronald Reagan's supply-side theories as "voodoo economics," then promptly jettisoned that belief in exchange for a place on the G.O.P. ticket. In 1988 he vowed to lower the deficit without raising taxes, only to reverse himself two years later when he signed the 1990 budget deal. That agreement raised all kinds of taxes -- and still failed to lower the deficit.

On the eve of a closely fought Georgia primary last month, Bush nailed the equivalent of a triple flip when he pronounced the 1990 budget compromise the biggest mistake of his presidency. To make matters worse, he virtually admitted that cynical political calculations had dictated the latest U-turn. "Listen, if I had to do that over, I wouldn't do it," he told reporters. "Look at all the flak it's taking." Bush was less than convincing when he announced, while campaigning in the South a few days later, that "life means nothing without fidelity to principles."

The President has an unfortunate habit of saying things he doesn't mean -- or failing to carry them out if he does mean them. In his State of the Union speech last January, he grandly promised to reform the nation's health- care system. He has yet to present a plan to Capitol Hill. Administration officials now admit that Bush is unlikely to propose a comprehensive health package this year. Reason: he is convinced Congress won't pass it. Another lost State of the Union proposal was a plan to raise the personal exemption for taxpayers by $500 a child for every family as "one thing we can do right away." Within days, the President postponed action on the plan and advisers told reporters that its passage was not a priority.

Bush is also suffering from a bad case of election-year opportunism. After working for two years with Congress to pass new laws regulating air pollution, establishing rights for disabled Americans and setting forth revised guidelines on civil rights, Bush now criticizes the regulations that have resulted from those measures. After three years of defending the status quo, he is trying to recast himself as an agent of change. Asked two weeks ago why he was making such an issue of welfare reform, an area he has ignored since 1987, Bush's reply was breathtakingly transparent: "I think the politics drives some things."

Bush has been known to speak out on the same day for both union and nonunion workers, for owls and loggers, for the environment and the industries that threaten it. When the self-proclaimed Education President needed to unveil a new education policy while addressing students at an Allentown, Pa., high school last week, he borrowed one -- from Clinton. Campaigning in Philadelphia for next week's Pennsylvania primary, Clinton blasted Bush for appropriating a guaranteed-college-loan plan "that has been at the core of my presidential campaign since the day I announced." The Governor quipped, "Now, they say I'm slick?"

Few people believed the President last summer when he pronounced Clarence Thomas the most qualified man for the Supreme Court and asserted that racial considerations had nothing to do with his nomination. In an even more blatant falsehood, Bush said he had forbidden all high-level exchanges with China after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre -- even as he secretly sent his top foreign policy aide to meet with Beijing's leaders.

It is impossible to say how Bush's character issues will affect the outcome in November. With the cold war over and no foreign crisis on the horizon, conventional wisdom holds that the state of the economy will decide the election. If so, Bush's personal shortcomings may be irrelevant. Even if Bush were shown to be guilty of all the things Bill Clinton has been accused of, there is a broader context in which the incumbent would be judged. But as the President's record comes under more scrutiny, his performance in office could become as much of a problem for him as unmentioned induction letters and uninhaled joints have been for Bill Clinton.