BUSH INHERITED PEACE, BOOM BUT NOW FACES WAR, RECESSION

Consider the remarkable accomplishments of George Herbert Walker Bush. Owing to his predecessor's overwhelming success, in January, 1989 he took office as the first sitting vice president to win the White House in 152 years. He inherited a nation at peace, its economy booming along at 3 percent annual growth, rolling toward the ninth straight year of the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history.

Today, George Bush's America is slipping into recession while on the brink of a war among whose casualties could be his own administration's chances for survival past 1992.

Unfair? Perhaps, but as John F. Kennedy reminded us, so is life. Politics is a blood sport, and coming to a television screen near you is the following Democratic National Committee soundbite: Our nation's miserable economy is The Bush Economy!

There is truth to the charge. At some point, responsibility cannot be disclaimed. For it is Mr. Bush who apparently believes his mission in life is to run a coalition government with men properly regarded as his cunning adversaries those House and Senate Majority Leaders, Dick Gephardt and George Mitchell.

It is Mr. Bush who abandoned his no-new-taxes pledge, getting nothing in return except a humiliating rout on every issue that mattered. It's George Bush whose Treasury Department is trashing the Yankee Dollar in pursuit of a will-o-the-wisp trade policy. Again, it was Bush who, instead of fighting the Congress and drawing highly profitable, us-against-them contrasts on spending, caved in to Washington's desire for a deficit- and government-expanding budget compromise. Bush, again, who has quit fighting for the one profound stimulus to an economy sorely in need of it a reduction in the capital gains tax.

How much more robust would our economic house be today and how much cheaper the S&L bailout if the cost of job-expanding capital had been reduced, and its mobility into newer and more productive hands accelerated? (Recall that as recently as fall, 1989, a capital gains tax cut actually passed the Democratic House of Representatives, and enjoyed clear majority support in the Senate. It was derailed by Majority Leader Mitchell, who so blindly opposed it as to make it a test of personal loyalty to him. You might call this one the Mitchell recession, except George Bush himself seems to have just quit on us.)

Instead of being true to the populist mandate that elected him, President Bush aligns himself with all the things middle America wants to fight. Higher taxes. Taxpayer-subsidized credits and loan guarantees for bankrupt regimes abroad. Higher salaries for congressmen and others who staff our imperial capital within the D.C. Beltway. A gargantuan federal government, its continuing growth guaranteed by the sort of inside-the-Beltway "consensus" George Bush loves.

Quick: has anyone seen a reference, in any TV news report, to the indisputable fact that under the "Deficit Reduction Act" just agreed to, Washington's take of the national wealth will be $100 billion higher than last year?

Ah, the endless wonder that is the mind of The Moderate Republican. Such men, one perceptive commentator has written, are almost without exception gentlemen of impeccable pedigree. The problem, however, is that they abhor the unseemliness of a political brawl. And all political revolutions worthy of the name involve brawling.

But George Bush, impeccable gentleman that he is, doesn't want to fight anybody. Nobody but Saddam Hussein. And he isn't about to lead any revolutions still less to sustain, build upon and extend the Reagan revolution that changed the course of events, transformed America's political landscape and elected this President.

The situation really is so bad that a Wall Street Journal editorial summed it up this week in two chilling, absolutely devastating sentences:

"... So shortly the (budget control) act will self-destruct, there will be no (spending) constraints whatever, the administration will have no proposals on the field, and we will end up with the Democratic Caucus's entire agenda. Congratulations, Mike Dukakis, you won after all."

Of course, that Democratic Caucus wants a recession (as some of their most candid members have said), the better to weaken this President as a prelude to defeating him in 1992. But why George Bush should play along in his own destruction defies analysis.

Necessary preconditions to any Bush administration turnaround would include: 1) a State of the Union address next month that went on the offensive for capital gains tax cuts; and 2) the firing or other early departure of Budget Director Dick Darman, the oh-so-brilliant architect of the administration's surrender to Capitol Hill. As things look now, neither is likely.

If, come St. Patrick's Day, Mr. Darman is secure in his plush quarters at the Office of Management and Budget, and there's been no clarion call for a new offensive on tax cuts, then today's conservatives will be in open revolt. We will not be party to the disasters toward which a rudderless Bush administration is leading this country.