The Political Interest: Two Visions, 21 Minutes Apart

When it came time to deny the obvious, the cool and unflappable James Baker did so with a straight face and a practiced hint of sadness. Like a compassionate schoolteacher calmly instructing a roomful of dim students, the Secretary of State repeatedly insisted that election-year politics had nothing to do with last week's announcement of the Administration's plan to assist the former Soviet Union. "We've been working on it for months," Baker explained, adding that the President wanted his proposals made public before Boris Yeltsin faces a restless Congress of People's Deputies this week. That much was true, but the rest was nonsense.

In fact, Pat Buchanan's mindless "America first" crusade had paralyzed Bush for months. Foreign policy, the President's passion and claim to fame, was stowed throughout the early primaries as Bush told Republican voters that his new first priority was repairing the domestic economy. Aiding Russia and the other republics became possible only when Buchanan's challenge waned after Bush's victories in Michigan and Illinois on March 17. But even then Bush was mute until Richard Nixon chastised the President for a "pathetically inadequate" nonresponse to Moscow's pleas for help. And even then nothing happened until the White House realized that last Wednesday morning Bill $ Clinton was about to unveil his scheme to assist the faltering former communists.

When Bush finally spoke, confusion reigned. "The stakes," the President soberly intoned, "are as high as any we have faced this century." But there was no prime-time, Oval Office address designed to rally a recession-weary nation to the cause -- only a pressroom briefing at which the Administration's key players couldn't say how much their proposal would cost. It was not until eight hours later that Baker said the U.S. contribution to a $24 billion multinational plan of loans, grants and export credits would cost American taxpayers a relatively small "$3-plus billion" in new funding.

Bush did manage to beat Clinton to the punch on Wednesday (by all of 21 minutes) but even that "victory" struck some of the President's more astute aides as hollow. "Either we should have beaten Clinton by at least one news cycle or we should have waited a few days," says a Bush political adviser. "As it was, all we did was pump up the opposition," par for the course for a campaign organization that has yet to get its bearings.

The Bush and Clinton plans are strikingly similar, and both still see the planet as a dangerous place where the occasional use of American force will likely be necessary for decades to come. From there, their prescriptions for dealing with the post-cold war world depart radically. Bush regularly trumpets democracy's virtues, but his actions routinely serve order and stability. Following the gulf war, the U.S. virtually "owned" Kuwait, but Washington did little to ensure democracy's ascendancy in the emirate. Yugoslavia is disintegrating, but Bush has yet to recognize Slovenia and Croatia. The President clung to Mikhail Gorbachev to the end, and viewed Yeltsin as the problem rather than the solution even after Yeltsin won Russia's first democratic election. Clinton's views are exactly opposite. Democracy, he says, offers the best hope for stability, even if moving toward representative government generates short-term disorder.