Playing For The Big Bounce

George Bush sees his life as a series of "missions assigned" and "missions accomplished." Accordingly, he set several goals for himself at the Republican Convention in Houston. He needed to reunite his splintering party after a brutal primary campaign. If he couldn't explain exactly what he wanted to do in a second term, he at least needed to remind a majority of Americans why they voted for him in 1988. And he needed to shave roughly half of Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton's 25-point lead in the polls.

By the time the Republicans had executed what may have been the largest balloon drop in political history Thursday night, Bush looked ready to move three more missions to his "accomplished" column. In his acceptance speech, he played the stature card, reminding Americans that on his watch the Berlin Wall fell, communism crumbled and Kuwait was liberated. After wrangling for weeks with advisers over how to reconcile his respectable record abroad with his listless performance at home, Bush reduced his pitch to two sentences: "This election is about change. The question is, Who do you trust to make change work for you?" Translation: "I'm not perfect, but the other guy's worse."

Striking themes more political than presidential, Bush attacked Clinton as a dangerous liberal who would raise taxes and has dithered at times of personal and national crisis. While perhaps not inspiring, Bush's lesser-of-two-evils pitch seemed to be working: by week's end polls showed that Bush was narrowing the gap as the relentless Republican attacks began to cut into Clinton's favorable ratings.

But Bush skipped gingerly around any discussion of the economy in his 56- min. speech. And the centerpiece of his economic proposals was a familiar package of tax cuts he has proposed to Congress several times before, supplemented by a hokey plan to allow taxpayers to donate up to 10% of their income tax payments to reducing the federal debt.

Before Bush's finale, the convention had a schizophrenic quality not often seen at G.O.P. gatherings. Night after night, the party's fault lines were laid bare for the nation to see. Patrick Buchanan's darkly apocalyptic speech Monday night all but raised the specter of race war, only to be followed minutes later by Ronald Reagan's soaring tribute to Bush and America's future. Wednesday, Barbara Bush gently prodded the conservative delegates to broaden their party's sometimes narrow definition of family, while warm-up act Marilyn Quayle championed a zero-tolerance approach to "family values." But it was Mary Fisher, the HIV-positive daughter of a top G.O.P. fund raiser, who held the Astrodome rapt with her insistence that AIDS victims "have not earned cruelty and do not deserve meanness." Coming after several days of antigay rhetoric, Fisher gave what many believed was the bravest speech of the week.

Such divisions may be a harbinger for the G.O.P. Without communism to kick around, without the prosperity that has helped Republicans hold the White House for 20 of the past 24 years, the party is groping for a new philosophical glue to hold its various constituencies together. Even if Bush can unite the factions this year, their increasingly irreconcilable differences guarantee that the G.O.P. is itself in for some "change" before it gathers again in 1996. (See related stories beginning on page 22.)

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 958 registered voters taken for TIME/CNN on Aug.19-20 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%

CAPTION: If the election for President were held today, for whom would you vote?