he New Republic's May 22 issue has a cover story by Jonathan Rauch on the underappreciated virtues of George Bush the elder, "our greatest modern president." Rauch is always worth reading, but the cover did make me wonder why TNR was doing this now. Until I got to Rauch's conclusion: If the voters want somebody like former president Bush back in the White House, they should. . . reject his son and vote for Al Gore. It's a wonderfully perverse argument, coupled to a pro-Gore spin. In other words, a natural for TNR.

According to Rauch, Bush was (and Gore is) "uninspiring but reliable, someone experienced and substantial even if unglamorous and politically ungainly." Instead of pursuing grand ideological visions, Bush concentrated on "avoiding major blunders" and managing the problems that came to his desk. Michael Dukakis was right in 1988: The most important issue in a presidential race is competence, not ideology. And Bush was nothing if not competent.

In particular, Rauch credits Bush for cleaning up the savings-and-loan mess, effecting a peaceful change of power in Nicaragua, ending the Cold War, and winning the Gulf War. Several of these instances of kudos are accompanied by swipes at Ronald Reagan, who is faulted for irresponsibility (the S&Ls) and ideological stubbornness (Nicaragua). Regarding the Cold War, Rauch writes that Reagan "pointed American policy in the right direction, which was important. The really tricky part, however, was not choosing the direction but landing the plane."

Now a case can be made that this aspect of Bush's record has been underestimated. Condoleezza Rice in fact made that case to my colleague Jay Nordlinger a few months ago (see his profile of her in our August 30, 1999 issue). But that's another thing entirely from saying that Bush's contribution was somehow more important than Reagan's. World War Two ended on Harry Truman's watch, but nobody gave him credit at FDR's expense. (In a rare act of ungraciousness, Bush neglected to mention Reagan in his Cold War victory speech.)

Bush's foreign policy was marred by a tendency to seek "stability" by shoring up regimes that could not or should not be sustained. He resisted the break-up of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia, for example, and refused to march on Baghdad partly for fear of the instability that would follow the overthrow of the Ba'athist regime there. (As Charles Krauthammer later observed, Bush's first choice was Saddamism without Saddam; but his second choice was Saddamism with Saddam.) The tilt toward Syria was of a piece with this indifference to ideology. Does anyone doubt that, had Bush won in 1980, the demands of "stability" would have precluded the vigorous challenge to the Soviet Union, both geopolitical and ideological, that Reagan in fact made? In any case, for Rauch, Bush's most important accomplishment did not take place abroad. It was, instead, his 1990 budget deal. Rauch writes that "you can't deny this fact: it was Bush's budget deal that broke the deficit's back."

Actually, you can. Rauch writes that Reagan "did to the government's finances what the iceberg did to the Titanic." But it is a matter of public record that when Bush took over from Reagan, the deficit was $150 billion and falling. When Bush left office, it was $290 billion and projected to rise.

Not that budget deficits are necessarily terrible. Reagan's deficit paid for a military build-up that helped win the Cold War and a disinflation and a low-tax regime that invigorated the economy. Those were good investments. Deficits went up under Bush, however, primarily because of a domestic spending spree. Domestic spending went up by $100 billion in the first year after Bush's budget deal. In a liberal culture and an administrative state, the man without convictions will find himself pulled inexorably to the left. (Which is why the unreformability of the modern state, the problem Rauch diagnosed in his book Demosclerosis, got worse under Bush.) If George W. Bush's policy agenda resembles that of Reagan more than that of his own father--which so far appears to be the case--that is a blessing.

But what about Gore? Are his politics really as pedestrian and managerial as Rauch implies? Rauch's conclusion seems half-hearted. And no wonder. Consider Gore's book Earth in the Balance. An extremely fair-minded treatment of it in the National Journal last year described Gore as "hysterical." It continued, "The extremism is troubling, even shocking. . . . [M]uch of the book comes off as simply screwy, the work of a dilettante who has dangerously overestimated his intellectual competence. . . . If Gore is still even half the man he was when he wrote Earth in the Balance, then the prospect of a Gore presidency seems unsettling. Not because of what Gore says, or even what he does, but because of the sort of person he is. Hysterics don't belong in the Oval Office, or anywhere near it."

The author of the National Journal essay was, of course, Jonathan Rauch.