NEITHER, PAT, DUKE NOR BUSH MAKES THE CONSERVATIVE CASE

The tremendous story that has gone largely untold is the full extent of President Bush's abandonment of Reaganism.

On the economic front, Reaganism consisted of a few readily identifiable principles, for each of which Mr. Reagan and his people fought tenaciously. Briefly, these are: Restraint in spending growth, especially in wasteful domestic programs. If not actually cutting the size of government, at least reducing its rate of growth, so that the productive private sector can breathe and prosper. A skeptical eye cast toward government regulation of business. Lower marginal tax rates, to unleash the productive energies of the American people and restore their status as majority shareholders in their own incomes. Renewed respect for the producers in our economy, especially small business, as the ones who pay the freight and make all philanthropy possible. A belief that a rising tide of economic prosperity fuelled by small entrepreneurs will lift everyone's boat.

President Bush has reversed course on some or all of these fronts. He is presiding over an increase in government spending at a faster rate than any president in recent history, including even Lyndon Baines Johnson, the previous grand champion. While military spending has fallen dramatically, domestic spending has increased at a clip of around 10 percent each year since '89. That was the year Mr. Bush, on the strength of Mr. Reagan's successes, became the first sitting vice president to win the White House since Martin Van Buren in 1836. How many businesses or households could operate in this profligate manner?

There's more. According to free market economist Dr. Murray Wiedenbaum of the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis, President Bush is presiding over a veritable explosion in re-regulation of business. Wiedenbaum, who served as Chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers in the first term, demonstrates in a recent paper that Mr. Bush's administration is re-regulating the American economy at a faster pace than Jimmy Carter. Pages in the Federal Register, the catalogue of federal regulations, had grown at a much slower pace under Mr. Reagan; today, the growth in those pages is back at a Carteresque pace.

Pretty soon it'll be time for another Ronald Reagan to come along and pare back all this growth in a bloated and wasteful federal government.

Robert Barro, a Professor of Economics at Harvard and a contributing editor at The Wall Street Journal, put the matter this way:

"... Some highlights of the Bush administration's domestic policies thus far are a tax increase, a rise in the minimum-wage rate, no significant steps toward deregulation of domestic markets, no progress in reforming the regulation of the financial industry, an increase in the duration of unemployment-insurance benefits, a `Civil Rights Bill' that amounts to an invitation to more litigation, and a recent flirtation with usury ceilings on credit-card interest rates. I cannot prove this record has led to the slow growth since 1989, but there is nothing in this package that looks like growth promotion."

This is the antithesis of Reaganism. Who will make the case? In the Republican primaries, the articulate Patrick J. Buchanan risks becoming marginalized out on the fringes by his own quirky positions. Buchanan focuses on such non-issues as immigration and trade protectionism, and on a brand of isolationism he calls "America First." This is not Reaganism; this is a kooky brand of nativism that risks taking the Big Tent of Ronald Reagan's conservatism and putting it, in one writer's words, "back in a pup tent."

Then there's David Duke, a racist, anti-Semitic sleazebag and freakish wierdo whose two losses in Louisiana, he believes, have provided him a pretext for a national candidacy. David Duke is going nowhere fast, kept alive by media fascination and at least some Democratic money from people who want him around as an irritant to Mr. Bush and mainstream Republicans.

No one in public life today on the national scene is making a principled case for the incredibly successful Reagan conservatism that gave us such a prosperous decade in the '80s. Thus, the winter of the conservatives' discontent.