Bush Builds Campaign Brain Trust
By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT
.c The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Texas Gov. George W. Bush has laid claim to the network of
friends and campaign supporters collected by his father over a political
lifetime.
But the younger Bush, who is two weeks away from announcing his own intentions
regarding a presidential run, hasn't tapped his father's White House advisers
in assembling a brain trust. Instead, the experts brought in to burnish Bush's
views on economic, domestic and foreign policy come largely from the Reagan
wing of the Republican Party. Others are new faces.
Bush has turned to Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, a leading disciple of
privatization, for domestic policy advice. Lawrence Lindsey, who served on
President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers and later was appointed by
President Bush to the Federal Reserve Board, heads the governor's economic
policy team. Another Reagan economic adviser, Harvard professor Martin
Feldstein, also has come aboard.
Condoleezza Rice, a Bush administration foreign policy adviser, heads the
foreign policy team. Paul Wolfowitz, who held State and Defense department
posts in the Reagan and Bush administrations, also is a key adviser.
The lineup, some suggest, marks a clear effort to send the signal that the
son's presidency would be far more conservative than the father's, which many
on the right had viewed as a watering down of the Reagan legacy.
``I would characterize them as conservative thinkers,'' Bush said this week of
his advisers.
He is openly stressing his ideological independence from his father. ``I'll be
a different candidate than the previous George Bush who ran for president,''
he told The Dallas Morning News. ``I love my dad, but I'm a different
person.''
William Kristol, who served in the Bush White House as Vice President Dan
Quayle's chief of staff, said the governor's strategy in picking a kitchen
Cabinet makes sense.
``He's emphasizing the outreach to the Reagan wing because he knows that his
potential vulnerability as a Bush is to a Reaganite assault,'' said Kristol,
who is editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. ``How does he lose
the nomination? He loses the nomination if someone else can say, `I'm Reagan,
he's Bush.'''
The prospective Republican field, which Bush and former Red Cross President
Elizabeth Dole dominate in early polls, includes several hopefuls who would
seek to outflank Bush on the right. Among them are Quayle, billionaire Steve
Forbes, TV commentator Pat Buchanan, social activist Gary Bauer and Sen. Bob
Smith of New Hampshire.
While declining to read anything into the makeup of Bush's advisory team,
Goldsmith, the Indianapolis mayor, said the advisers are advocates of
conservative policies.
``Big ideas drive quality of life, and to have even a small part in this
effort to think through governance is really an enormous opportunity for me,
and hopefully a way I can contribute a little bit,'' said Goldsmith. He has
joined in several policy roundtables in Austin, Texas, and heads there again
Friday.
Bush's choice of counselors may be as much generational as ideological, said
Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
``He is picking people who come from the Reagan-Bush administration, but in
some ways he's picking a different generation,'' Ornstein said. ``The younger
Bush administration team, as a group, was more ideological than the people who
were from George Bush's generation.''
excerpts from "George W's Brain Trust for 2000" by columnist Robrt D. Novak
San Francisco Chronicle, February 24, 1999
"Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Bush is agonizing over whether
to seek the presidency, advanced development of a brain trust confirms those
in close contact with the governor who say it is now 100 percent certain he
will. What's more, the nature of his advisers suggests that a second Bush
presidency would be considerably MORE conservative than the first ...
<snip>
"The most interesting new initiator of the national-security neophyte is
Paul Wolfowitz, one of the pre-eminent foreign-policy hard-liners ...
Wolfowitz's close friend and ally Richard Perle is expected in Austin soon for
his first visit with Bush. Taking an even harder line than Wolfowitz, Perle
was the Reagan administration's "Prince of Darkness" as assistant secretary of
defense.
"The budding Bush brain trust is unusual because it precedes a campaign
team. But that is understandable for a Republican presidential front-runner
who is a blank page when it comes to foreign and much of national policy.
"If the brain trust reflects who the governor would put in office if
elected president, his administration would be to the right not only of his
father's but of Ronald Reagan's ..."
