BUSH'S FAILURE ANSWERED BY THE PEOPLE: OUR SYSTEM WORKS

In an important sense, nationwide, last week's presidential election results can be said to confirm that our political system works. How can a Republican who voted for George Bush arrive at such a conclusion? Easy.

George Bush's presidency failed. Just as there is a price for failure in the business world bankruptcy so there should be a price for failure in the political world.

The exile of George Bush and his minions is now unceremoniously accomplished. The patrician Mr. Bush was born to power and privilege. He seemed to regard his continuation in office as a birthright, an entitlement, rather than a trust to be earned and an honor to be bestowed by a people who must be wooed. Stocking the executive branch with products of snooty eastern schools, Mr. Bush presided over the most elitist administration since the collapse of the Federalist Party.

In his most astonishing move, President Bush also implicitly sued for divorce from the successful policies of his predecessor and patron, Ronald Reagan. This was curious, this desire for distance from popular policies that made him the first sitting vice president to win the White House in 152 years. It was signalled at the 1988 GOP convention in New Orleans, when Mr. Bush announced he wanted a "kinder, gentler America." Heavyweight columnist Bill Safire reports that Nancy Reagan, listening from the presidential box, tartly observed, "Kinder than who?" (She may be forgiven a little grammatical inexactitude.)

Secretary Jack Kemp, of Housing and Urban Development, is the exception that proves the rule: Domestically, the Bush administration was nearly all thumbs and tin ears, and since Lee Atwater fell ill it possessed no member with that savvy pol's innate sense of the middle class. The worst Republican presidential campaign in memory met up with the most intensely focused and competent group of Democratic campaigners in years. Last week Mr. Bush was tossed out by the governor of a small state who was widely thought to be a member of his party's "B" team.

Cautionary notes and ironies abound for those who would overread the Clinton victory. First among these is a startling fact: Bill Clinton achieved 2 percent less of the popular vote than a defeated Michael Dukakis won in 1988. Clinton won a majority in exactly one state: Arkansas. Dukakis, it must be remembered, did pretty well for a liberal: he won ten states. With his 45 percent, Dukakis, running as an arrogant ACLU liberal and a cold fish from Harvard, lost 40 states to George Bush.

Clinton's 43 percent won him 30 states and the White House. In sharp contrast to Dukakis, Bill Clinton ran as a centrist, repudiated the left-wing of his party, presided over well-publicized Little Rock executions and ostentatiously stiffed Sister Souljah, together with her protector, the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Like Jimmy Carter in 1976, he actually got to the Republican incumbent's right on a few issues, notably foreign policy, as in the Balkans. He was explicit in repudiating the last three Democratic presidential nominees, and he is president-elect Clinton mainly because he succeeded in portraying his all-Deep South ticket as embodying a "New Democratic Party."

An electorate unsure of where Gov. Clinton stood, and deeply suspicious of his character, also knew that President Bush stood for no identifiable principles on domestic policy, or how to get the economy moving. The incumbent even seemed at times to be annoyed at the notion that he should have an economic program worthy of a fight. Seven or 8 out of ten Perot voters were defectors from the Reagan-Bush coalition, dismayed at the collapse of leadership and no fighting spirit in the Oval Office.

"Trust is the coin of the realm," goes an old saying. Well, Mr. Bush's own flip-flops and flailing about had devalued his own trustworthiness by Fall 1990, long before most Americans had heard of Gov. Clinton. George Bush's inneffectual attempts to pin the "trust" issue on the slippery Arkansas governor served principally to magnify the incumbent's own deficiencies on that score.

And so an electorate aching for "change" will get it. Nicely done. As an afficianado of well-run campaigns, I can salute a brilliant job by the hungry and talented and intensely focused Clinton forces.

Nothing I have said above should diminish the accomplishment Clinton's campaign succeeded in pulling off. This is true because nothing else matters: they have the White House. It's true: there was neither a mandate, nor coattails, nor a majority. It doesn't matter: they have the White House. The president-elect is, like Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon before him, a plurality (43 percent) winner. Recall, though, that Wilson won reelection, as did Nixon, a personally unpopular leader who won 49 states and 61 percent in his 1972 landslide.

My guess is that President-elect Clinton will seek to govern (or at least work hard to be perceived as governing) as a centrist. Look for relatively conservative appointees at Treasury (to reassure the markets) and at Defense (Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, or somebody approved by him). The most telling sign is in economic policy. A national Democratic party that has been demagoging a capital gains tax cut and blocking it for four years all of a sudden announces it will give us a cut in the capital gains tax!

We live in a weird world, where cunning adversaries will cut you up and savage you, and then, given power, turn right around and enact policies they opposed, policies they knew all along the country needed. George Bush, together with the curious species of moderate Republicanism he represents, never understood that. As a failed leader, the squire of Kennebunkport will have plenty of time to reflect on it now.