How Bush Plans To Win

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But even if the world is changing, many of the ideas Bush is touting have been on the shelf for years. The President is proposing incentives for employers to offer flex-time arrangements that would allow workers to work longer hours so they could accrue comp time and use it at their discretion. He is also preparing to unveil a successor to the No Child Left Behind Act that would try to make high schools more accountable — the first bill was directed more at younger kids — and a proposal that would make community colleges more accessible through increased financial aid. Other proposals will stress greater personal control over health insurance and personal initiative rather than government programs to promote home ownership and retirement savings. One plan he may talk more about is the Newt Gingrich — led idea to lower health-care costs by computerizing the nation's vast medical records.

"Finally this is the boogie to the middle," says a longtime Republican strategist, who along with others has been worried that Bush's efforts to galvanize his socially conservative base by pushing, say, the gay-marriage ban, would permanently alienate moderate voters. In the run-up to the G.O.P. Convention, Bush will spend so much time with his former bitter primary rival John McCain, the party's moderate icon, that it may very well look as if Bush is running with the wrong white-haired, balding guy. McCain is scheduled to stump by himself for Bush in Florida next week and then be joined by the candidate for a few days. Before the convention, the two are to spend still more time together.

The Bush team will seek to portray the new agenda as visionary, but even some Bush allies refer to it as small ball, a derisive phrase the President uses for the picayune. Bush will pitch his new programs under the guise of giving people more control of their lives, but it is an open question whether voters, already beset with mind-numbing choices about their retirement and health care, are going to warm to plans that require more decision making. Even Bush partisans aren't sure about the agenda's appeal. "I'm not spinning you," insists a Bush adviser after pitching the plan. "Much." Indeed, Kerry's frontal assault on Social Security privatization in his acceptance speech signaled that the Democrats think the smart money is on dismissing Bush's vision of an "ownership society" as a Darwinian world in which seniors and the middle class can lose everything to the vagaries of the market.

And can the boogie to the middle work at this stage? "It's going to be damn hard to change the impressions of independent voters, who already know him, when he has 45% negatives" with them, concedes a Republican strategist. Democratic pollster Mark Penn argues, "Bush has been pursuing a suicidal strategy for the Republican base since the State of the Union, and he's dropping like a stone the entire time. He looks like he's beginning to reorient his campaign towards the center, but it is awful late to begin that."