COLUMN RIGHT : Ideas Drive Politics, and Bush Has None : Democrats have jerked him about because he signaled flexibility.

President Bush’s inept budget dealings will cost him dearly. He has lost credibility; the word will be given a workout in the weeks ahead. His feckless repudiation of his own positions, staked out only days earlier, will no doubt be assembled into a devastating videotape, to be cherished and circulated by the Democratic National Committee. Bush may nonetheless be consoling himself with the thought that he will at least come away with his five-year, $500-billion deficit reduction, if at high political cost.

I’m told that earlier this year Budget Director Richard G. Darman reassured the President that if the deficit-reduction package became law, he would not have to worry his head about mundane fiscal matters for the remainder of his first term. Things are not likely to work out so easily.

In his unsuccessful televised appeal earlier this month, President Bush remarked that “it’s the toughest deficit reduction package ever,� with “the largest spending savings ever--more than $300 billion.� For the first time, he boasted, Democratic leaders of Congress had agreed to “real cuts,� with “no smoke, no mirrors, no magic act.�

Budget numbers are tedious, but I beg the reader’s indulgence. To a surprising degree, the following figures have been overlooked in all the budget maneuvering. Notice the awkward phrase used by the President: “Spending savings.� That suggests smoke and mirrors right there.

In fiscal 1990, the year that ended on Sept. 30, total government spending was $1.26 billion. In the year just beginning, including the famed deficit reduction, projected government spending will be $1.36 billion. That is an increase of $100 billion, or 8%. For comparison purposes, the total federal budget at the time of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural was $100 billion. Today, a one-year increase of that amount is called . . . deficit reduction! How can this be?

The government was planning to increase spending by an even greater amount (by about $124 billion). But then the estimators lopped off $24 billion and said they had “cut� spending by that amount. That’s called adjusted consolidated base-line budgeting, and you don’t want to know anything more about it. In the next fiscal year, 1992, spending goes up again, to $1.392 billion, and in case you were wondering, that’s another “cut� (because otherwise it would have been $1.442 billion). Smoke and mirrors, I would call it.

So far, the news media have been very polite about all this and more or less have refrained from pointing out the embarrassing details, but any day now they will begin to do so. Bush will find out what “deficit reduction� really means: spending increases, with new taxes to pay for them. The “$500-billion deficit reduction� will be re-labeled the “1990 Bush tax increase.’

In 1982, incidentally, President Reagan was hoodwinked in much the same way, with a promise by Congress that it would give him $3 in spending cuts for every $1 that taxes were increased. He delivered on the taxes, but Congress went on spending as before. In fiscal 1980, which ended just before Reagan was elected, total federal spending was $591 billion. Between 1981-91, tax revenues increased by 90%. But spending increased by 107%. That’s why we have a deficit today. Spending is out of control.

Revenues increased as much as they did because the economy was growing, and it was growing because tax rates were cut. Now they are being raised, and the effect on growth will not be good. Bush will be thwarted in his desire to forget about the budget. With tax increases, he will have to think about it endlessly.

The President is about to discover one of the great Washington paradoxes: Pragmatism doesn’t work. It didn’t work for Jimmy Carter and it won’t work for Bush. This seems odd, of course, because pragmatism means pursuing the workable rather than the ideal; being flexible rather than intransigent. But it has been noted in Washington that political appointees can cope with the bureaucracy more easily if they are academics with ideas rather than businessmen used to meeting a payroll. It’s even more true at the presidential level.

Ideas drive politics; call it ideology if you will. Without it, you’re at sea. In recent weeks Bush has lamely pleaded that he would have liked a better deal, ideally, but those mean Democrats forced him to do what he had hoped to avoid. Once they saw that his point of compromise was movable, based on a desire to reach any agreement rather than a particular one, they kept moving that point further from his initial position. In short, they jerked him about, because he signaled flexibility. He has only himself to blame.

Now Bush is in trouble. Watch for references to his “credibility.�