BUSH AD GORE.

• Author: FORTIER, JOHN
• Position: Brief Article

THE STATES' STAKE IN NOVEMBER

There are real and important differences between the presidential candidates and their parties that will have a major impact on the states and the federal system.

Politics 2000 did not exactly start with a bang. The press reaction was clearly expressed by ABC's announcement that the network would show pre-season Monday Night Football instead of the opening nights of the two party nominating conventions! To be sure, the two major party candidates have done little so far to excite voters.

Neither Bush nor Gore has run a scintillating campaign and both are racing hard to capture the middle ground where majorities reside. While each side has worked mightily to show the differences between Bush and Gore on issues like Social Security--and there are real differences--slogans like "compassionate conservatism" and "progress and prosperity" suggest this is not a race between a Barry Goldwater, barn-burning, eviscerate-government taxes conservative and a Lyndon Johnson, fire-breathing, tax-and-spend liberal.

But the broad boredom, even if it reflects mid-summer doldrums and strong economy complacency, is unjustified. The 2000 election will go down as one of the most interesting and consequential of our lifetime. For me thing, this is the first contest since 1952 in which everything is up for grabs--the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the state legislative balance for redistricting in 2002. The presidential choice is at the center of all this critical change, and is more important for the direction of change than anything else.

The next president will face a Congress with extremely close partisan margins in both houses making presidential leadership even more important. He will possibly have two, three or more Supreme Court vacancies to fill, along with hundreds of lower court positions. He will have a significant say over how future budget surpluses are used, including how much will revert to states and localities, and under what conditions.

Even if the only differences between the candidates were in personal background and style, the choice would be important. But in addition, there are important differences between the candidates and the parties--differences that will have a major effect on the federal system.

THE CANDIDATES: BUSH

In some respects, Al Gore and George W. Bush have a lot in common. Both are sons of national political figures. Both have Eastern, Ivy League educations--Gore at St. Alban's and Harvard, and Bush at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School. Both have preferred to stress their Southern roots over their Ivy educations.

But there are also major differences. Bush's governmental experience is more limited than Gore's. His experience is grounded in Austin, as a governor, while Gore's is grounded in Washington, as a congressman, senator and vice president. If where you stand depends on where you sit, combine Bush's party and ideology with his experience, and you find a state-oriented politician; combine Gore's, and you find one more oriented to Washington. Of course, orientations do not invariably lead to policy positions, much less policy outcomes. It is worth remembering that Bill Clinton was more like George W. Bush than Al Gore in his experience. Clinton has been an activist president, but one quite sensitive to states, especially through his administration's expansive grants of waivers in many areas of social policy. Some of that sensitivity has probably rubbed off on Gore.

What can we learn about George Bush from his governing years? He has been a pragmatic, bipartisan governor. He had four priorities for reform: juvenile justice, welfare, tort law and education, and he focused on them relentlessly. Working with Democratic majorities in both legislative chambers, Bush compromised on the details, but delivered on the general principles he espoused.

In his second term, Bush has taken more risks and not always succeeded, for example, in reforming Texas's tax structure. But he has not ventured much beyond a handful of top issues. Some describe him as a modern CEO, employing a wide range of advisers and delegating the details to subordinates. His critics grant that Bush is involved in his priorities, but worry that he is not so well versed in other issues and is liable to be blindsided by events. His big picture focus and ability to work with Democrats could serve him well in Washington, but his experience as governor is not wholly transferable; the Texas governorship is a weak executive office and Texas Democrats are a lot more conservative than their brethren in Washington.

Most observers and friends say Governor Bush is more conservative than his father. But his world view, as shown both in his governorship and his campaign, is of an activist, if limited, government. In his presidential campaign, he has proposed an extensive series of new federal government programs. To pick just one area-his approach to the disabled-he has proposed a "technology transfer fund" to subsidize small business efforts to adapt for handicapped individuals; a program to purchase computers to enable the disabled to telecommute; money to subsidize churches and synagogues to build wheelchair ramps; and to triple the federal funding for disability research. In many respects, his approach parallels that of Bill Clinton-many small, often symbolic, government programs across a wide range of social areas.

Columnist Michael Kinsley has pointed out that in Bush's June speech on reinventing government, he calls for more government half a dozen times while giving his own vision of government action as settled around three principles: government should be "citizen-centered, results-oriented and, wherever possible, market-based." Those principles could easily mean an extremely constrained role for the federal government-but the programmatic initiatives, even if they are quite small in budget terms, suggest otherwise.

The place to start on Bush and federalism is with his association with fellow Republican governors. Bush came into office in 1994 with a Republican tide. In...