FOR SOMEONE who prides himself on his self-image of strong leadership, President Bush has taken two revealing swan dives on the issues of race and privacy.

In each case, he lacked the courage of his alleged convictions and chose to cower behind the canned statements of White House pols that explicitly contradicted his past positions.

On race, this is the guy who defiled Martin Luther King's birthday this year by filing Supreme Court briefs seeking to dismantle more than a generation of opportunity-enhancing affirmative actions programs in state university admissions.

Four months later, after at best a split verdict that finally enshrined racial diversity as a ''compelling state interest'' worthy of aggressive action as long as it is not rigidly mathematical, the White House issued a statement in Bush's name that had him ''applaud'' the Supreme Court for recognizing what he had urged it to ignore. The president's position had been vintage, country club conservative: amicable toward diversity as a value but hostile toward both methods at issue in the University of Michigan's college and law school.

Rather than defend his position, Bush caved, a fact not lost on his more principled conservative allies. The president actually praised the court for its ''careful balance'' between diversity and equal treatment of individuals after arguing that both admissions programs were the equivalent of quotas and equally odious. At least his brother, Jeb, has the guts to stand up for his own views in his opposition to the civil rights agenda in Florida.

On privacy, the court's sweeping decision to make gay people off limits to the police and state law when they are making love, Bush was even more shameful. He simply hid.

As governor of Texas he had supported the law criminalizing the consensual conduct of gay people. So when this absurd example of state-sponsored bigotry got tossed by the court Bush ducked the question of whether he agreed, given the enormous national consequences of this ruling for concepts that go to the heart of individual rights for all people.

Instead, his spokesman was programmed to say that the president had nothing to say because the administration hadn't filed a legal brief in the case. Worse, the spokesman claimed the issue is not presidential in any event because it is now a matter for the states.

As his conservative pals tried to point out, the opposite is the case. A matter that Texas and three other states had addressed had been plucked from their sovereignty and made federal via the US Constitution. Fostering racial diversity after centuries of brutal subjugation and decades of prejudice is now a legitimately compelling state interest, but enforcing the allegedly ''moral'' codes of some religions is just as decidedly not - a fact that will make official bigotry (in the military as well as in marriage contracts) harder to defend in the years ahead. Just about everyone involved on all sides of these questions recognized the immense importance and consequences of this ruling - except President Bush.

These twin defeats for the right last week have created true consternation in conservative ranks and greatly raised the stakes should Bush ever have an opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice - soon or eventually. The immediate target for the right's ire is White House counsel Alberto Gonzales - a genuine presidential intimate. He is getting the usual, one-note media treatment both for narrowing the administration's affirmative action court brief to opposition to the Michigan programs from a broader assault on any use of race in admissions, and for failing to speak out on the right's favorite social issues.

In seeking to disqualify Gonzales, the conservative movement is displaying its reliance on ideology as a substitute for qualification in the administration of justice - precisely the accusation it has long leveled at liberals. The activists on the right - the key element in the Republican coalition's base - want votes on the court, not able judges.

They should at least get credit for the courage of their convictions, but they also deserve a nod for the shrewdness of their analysis. In the right's fury over the Michigan and Texas decisions, there is an understanding of two ideological concepts embraced by just three justices - William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.

If racial diversity in society is accepted as a legitimate and major concern of government, affirmative action in some form follows as night does day. If there is a right of privacy that suffuses the Constitution and Bill of Rights without being mentioned specifically, then the social agenda of the right is largely blocked.

Those who hit from the left side of the plate stopped trusting Bush as a person and as a leader a long time ago. Now, those on the right must wonder if the liberals don't have a point.

Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company

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