George Bush en zoon George W. Bush

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The people have spoken," said George Bush, and they surely had. They had given him his lifetime goal, making him the 41st president of the United States.And when the ballots rolled in, it was very nearly a landslide: a solid Republican margin of 8 points in the popular vote and a 426-112 rout in the Electoral College. For all the talk that a newly feisty Michael Dukakis was closing fast in the final days, the margin didn't seem to have changed much from the polls a week before.

It was a moment to savor, a personal vindication after years of put-downs as a perennial loser, and Bush was clearly jubilant as he claimed the victory in a giant ballroom at the Houston convention center. But he also moved quickly to begin healing the wounds of the long and bitter campaign.

He paid tribute to Dukakis and his family, praised the Massachusetts governor for a gracious phone call conceding the race and said he meant to be president of all the people - including those who didn't support him. "When I said I wanted a kinder and gentler nation, I meant it - and I mean it," he said. "My hand is out to you and I want to be your president, too."

What kind of president will George Bush be? For all his conciliatory words, the short answer is probably "embattled." It is a daunting job at best; given the snarl of unfinished business and the mountain of unpaid bills left behind by Ronald Reagan, Bush might come to look with nostalgia on his untroubled days as vice president. The bitter campaign threatens to spill over into the first months of his administration, pitting him against a hostile Congress.

Ad for all the election-night celebration, many of his own backers had to be a bit uneasy about the man they had just installed in the Oval Office. After 22 years of public life and a year in the spotlight of a national campaign, George Bush remains an opaque and elusive man, more question than answer.

In the light of the exit polls, Bush's victory seemed less a personal endorsement than a pocketbook vote. He won more than 85 percent of the voters who approved of Ronald Reagan, who thought they were better off because of the Reagan administration and who favored keeping the nation on Reagan's course. With America at peace, inflation at bay and unemployment on the wane, the incumbent Republicans had too great an edge: Bush kept the allegiance of enough "Reagan Democrats" to swing at least half the key industrial states Dukakis was counting on.

He also narrowed the gender gap, and an apathetic turnout among black voters hurt Dukakis in key states. For the Democrats, it was only marginally better than Walter Mondale's trouncing by Ronald Reagan four years ago. The fifth loss in the past six national elections left the party besieged and forlorn, reduced to a diehard core in a few Northern states and an outpost in Hawaii.

Still, the outcome gave Bush no sweeping mandate. His low-road campaign, featuring karate chops at Dukakis as a free-spending liberal who was soft on crime and pollution, had set no agenda for the voters to endorse. Furthermore, Bush provided no coattails to pull his party into power: the Republicans stood to lose two seats in the Senate and five in the House, leaving the Democrats in firm control.

They threatened to ignore the White House and fashion their own parliamentary government. And Bush faced trouble in Congress even from his nominal allies; his Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, shrugged on election night that the president-elect had "as much of a mandate as Jack Kennedy or Jimmy Carter" - in Republican eyes, virtually none at all.

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But Bush hadn't promised anything dramatic. The message of his campaign was that he would be a somewhat milder version of Ronald Reagan - a "knee-jerk moderate," as one senior aide describes him. Bush is an establishment Republican who tempers ideology with pragmatism and promises to pay a bit more attention to the details of foreign policy, civil rights and the appearance of propriety among his cronies. His move to the White House may be the friendliest transition in recent memory.

While Bush promised to make broad changes in his cabinet, at least four members of Reagan's team - Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos and Labor Secretary Ann Dore McLaughlin - are widely expected to stay on.

In a conciliatory Wednesday-morning press conference, Bush named his campaign chairman, James A. Baker III, to become secretary of state. And literally dozens of familiar Republican names have been touted for top jobs. Among them: Brent Scowcroft (CIA head or national-security adviser), Richard Darman (budget director) and John Tower (defense secretary).

So Washington will be spared another Carter-style invasion - but there won't be much of a honeymoon, either. Politics aside, Bush will find himself hedged in by a high wall of constraints. He has pledged to wage war on drugs, expand Medicare and start new programs in education, child care and environmental cleanup.

But to remedy these ills he will have to hurdle Reagan's biggest legacy, the federal budget deficit. Even with the best conceivable luck - no war, no recession, no great financial or energy crisis - Bush faces a presidency of hard choices: spending cuts, curtailed programs, a stagnant or even shrinking standard of living. Bush's America threatens to be a diminished nation.

For George Bush, victory was a personal vindication. A proud and thin-skinned patrician, he was derided for years as a natural loser: a politician who failed in all but one of his races, a deferential errand boy in one appointive post after another, a man who trimmed his beliefs to suit his superiors. Somehow, with his formal nomination at the August convention in New Orleans, he stepped out of Reagan's long shadow and miraculously became his own man. On the ropes after the Iowa caucuses, he gritted out a key victory in New Hampshire and hung on to win the nomination.

But even his friends can't say whether the Oval Office will work similar magic and transform Bush into a real chief executive. In 22 years of public life, he has never run a show of his own. And unlike Ronald Reagan, who ran for president to lead a conservative revolution, Bush seemed only to want to be president. "We've seen from this campaign that George Bush likes to win," said a Republican elder. "The question is, on behalf of what?"

This seeming lack of bedrock beliefs leads some to suspect that the new administration will get off to a slow start. "He's never moved quickly to put his mark on a new job," said Fred Greenstein, a political scientist at Princeton. "He's been like a chameleon that takes its colors from its environment. Bush may have a substantial period of sitting in neutral."

But any long dither would surprise those who know Bush best. His family and aides say he is a decisive activist; his wife, Barbara, says he "looks at every letter just once" and decides immediately what to do with it. He is a problem-solver who reacts to specific facts rather than ideological concerns, says his old friend Nick Brady; he is a collegial man who prefers oral briefings to long position papers, encourages disagreement from his staff, works the telephone tirelessly for advice and doesn't panic when things go wrong.

Former presidential press secretary Larry Speakes, no great fan of Bush's, wrote in his memoirs that "I have never been so impressed with Bush" as on the night in 1981 when Reagan was shot and Bush "instantly took command." Bush is noted for loyalty to his staffers and is legendary for consideration: for years, he and Barbara have usually started their Christmas vacation on Dec. 26 so that aides and Secret Service agents can spend Christmas Day with their families.

The downside to all this is that Bush is an unreflective man, lacking much depth or ideological conviction. His own autobiography draws no great lessons from the Watergate scandal or from any other incidents in his public life. When Ted Koppel asked him about the Iran-contra scandal in a "Nightline" interview, Bush brushed it off as "two or three little issues that have gone wrong." Bush seeks out and generally finds able, competent staffers. But he does not hire brilliant people, and he has his share of glib, charming lightweights on his staff. He can be obstinate, and he holds grudges. There are also times when Bush keeps his own counsel, to the point of secretiveness. Going it alone can be perilous in the Oval Office.

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Pessimists argue that the only decisions President Bush will get to make are the hard ones - not what should be done, but what must be forgone. In this view, Bush will be so hamstrung by Reagan's legacy of spending and debt that his administration will be in effect Reagan's third term, with the bills falling due. Bush has experience shoring up wobbly institutions, from the Republican Party in Texas in the 1960s to the scandal-ridden CIA. Now he must restore credibility to the U.S. economy.

There's no doubt that Reagan had the legendary luck of the Irish. In what Bush himself once derided as "voodoo economics," Reagan promised that his huge early tax cuts would stimulate so much economic activity that tax revenues would actually increase, not decline, and so balance the budget. In reality, annual deficits of $ 200 billion and more actually doubled the national debt in the Reagan years, to $ 2.6 trillion; interest alone this year will come to $ 160 billion, 38 percent of federal tax revenues.

But a fortuitous combination of events delayed the inflation or recession that this policy would normally have brought. First, the soaring U.S. dollar helped create a massive trade deficit, and foreigners accumulating dollars used them to invest in America, buying land, stocks and government bonds. The inflow effectively supported the budget deficit. But while this was going on, Americans were selling off their assets, cheapening their currency and mortgaging their children's future - not for healthy investment, but to buy a flood of imported consumer goods.

Bush himself is said to be a convert to voodoo economics: after all, it worked for years. But the game may be over. With the dollar down more than 40 percent from its highs, foreigners are no longer blindly willing to pour money into America. To avert financial disaster, Bush must prove he can bring the deficit down. He has vowed over and over - "Read my lips" - not to raise taxes.

But hardly anyone believes that, including his close associates; one insider predicts that after the first year in office, Bush will agree to a tax increase. In fact, key advisers were working on scenarios for such an increase well before the election. "I don't read lips," said Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, chief of the House Ways and Means Committee. "If he wants to do something about the deficit, I don't know how he can do it without increased revenues."

Further spending cuts look dubious at best. For one thing, Reagan's military buildup was done on the installment plan, with the bulk of the bills coming due in the early 1990s. Just to hew to likely congressional spending limits over the next five years, Bush will have to cut the Pentagon's budget by at least $ 180 billion - and perhaps as much as $350 billion - through that period. And the military crunch is just for openers.

Congress will have to find perhaps $130 billion to clean up the newly uncovered national mess of pollution from nuclear weapons plants, an additional $ 100 billion to bail out bankrupt savings and loan associations and as much as $ 64 billion a year in added Medicare spending by 1993. All that doesn't allow for doing anything new about education, housing, drug treatment, child care or long-term care for the elderly, among other problems.

Optimists argue that Bush will indeed be forced to curtail spending sharply and forgo new programs, but that isn't all bad: with the economy still growing, inflation under control and productivity on the rise again, Reaganesque prosperity can continue indefinitely.

But even if that should somehow come to pass, it wouldn't necessarily raise U.S. living standards. We have sold off so much of the country and borrowed so much from foreigners that just paying them interest and dividends would soak up all the added money churned out by an annual growth rate of 2 percent. Voodoo or no voodoo, the heady days of the early Reagan years are over.

Bush's honeymoon may end almost as soon as he takes office. A clash with Congress is likely on the question of a tax increase; others are sure to follow as the lawmakers take Bush up on his campaign promises to move on child care, education and the environment. "And when Bush goes to his Senate minority leader for help, what's Bob Dole going to tell him?" asks Gary Orfield of the University of Chicago. "It was Dole who said in the primaries that you can't make promises without finding a way to pay for them."

It may be because he senses these limits that Bush tells his friends he is most interested in foreign affairs - the part of the job least dependent on funding and most open to White House control. He says he will be more active and engaged than Reagan was, but more cautious, too.

He is a skeptic, for instance, when it comes to the prospects that Mikhail Gorbachev will succeed with what Bush calls the "significant, remarkable" changes he is attempting in the Soviet Union. Bush has no such revolutionary ideas in mind for U.S. policy; Brent Scowcroft, his prospective national-security director (or possibly CIA director or defense secretary), says Bush's policy will be "mainstream. Unimaginative, perhaps. But mainstream."

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As some of his advisers see it, the first need is for a sweeping overhaul of global U.S. strategy, matching policy goals with the resources available to achieve them. It's been 20 years since Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon hammered out a coherent policy, and it must be updated before Bush can come to grips with the defense budget, the need to persuade the NATO allies to accept more of the burden of defending Europe and the problem of Japan's growing economic and diplomatic clout in the Pacific.

Bush must also face up to Kissinger's question: "What is our policy toward a Soviet Union in the throes of change?" Do we want Gorbachev's perestroika to succeed? If so, are we prepared to help him? If he seems to be failing, should we try to lock in deals with the Soviets that a new leader will find hard to break?

It isn't Bush's style to approach problems in any such sweeping conceptual terms, but at least some of his associates will be pushing him in that direction. And planning in the diplomatic and military areas is far enough along that sources close to Bush offer surprisingly specific predictions. Partly to cut U.S. costs in Europe, for instance, he is expected to get tough with the allies on burden-sharing.

He will downplay Reagan's Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative, approving only a limited system that might intercept an accidentally launched missile, and will push for treaties with Moscow on both SDI and strategic arms. He wants an early summit with Gorbachev and plans to challenge him to pull some troops out of Eastern Europe. Bush wants to create a NATO-like alliance for security in the Pacific; in Latin America he hopes to persuade Nicaragua's neighbors to take over primary responsibility for dealing with the Sandinista government.

But the cornerstone of Bush's foreign policy is the momentum Reagan left behind; real movement toward peace in regional conflicts, better East-West Relations and continuing progress on arms control. The world is measurably quieter these days, and Bush wants to keep it that way.

George Bush was formed by the Eastern establishment, and he shares its virtues: he is gracious, generous, courageous, fiscally prudent and deeply patriotic. This is the "Poppy" (his childhood nickname) who twinkles invisibly in Garry Trudeau's inspired cartoons. But the patrician background also has its downside.

This is the Bush who relishes covert actions and never objected to the arms-for-hostages deals with Iran, who detests the snoopers of the press and prefers to live in an off-the-record world. It is the Bush who sees private charity - "A thousand points of light" - as a cure for poverty, homelessness and malnourished children. It is the Bush who can talk seriously about adoption as a substitute for 1.5 million abortions every year.

During the campaign, Bush sometimes seemed at war with himself. He would play Attack Man on the stump, slashing Dukakis with the L-word or invoking the specter of Willie Horton; then he would chuckle and shake his head in rueful deprecation. Or he would preface a down-and-dirty remark with a self-conscious question: "Is this the time to unleash our one-liners?" But the Devil-made-me-do-it stump style can't really obscure the fact that it was indeed Bush who was doing it.

Optimists can hope that the aura of the Oval Office will reconcile the decent and hard sides of Bush. It wouldn't be the first time that the office has lifted the man. Old-timers recall another election, one of the shabbiest ever, a triumph of invective over substance. The winner was a political hack, a nonentity who seemed to have floated into the White House on a backwash of nostalgia for his predecessor. But that, of course, was 1948 - and in the end, "Give 'em hell" Harry Truman surprised nearly everybody by becoming one of the best of modern presidents.

Larry Martz, John Barry, Ann McDaniel, Howard Fineman and Margaret Garrard Warner

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