Rude Awakening

By DAN GOODGAME

Seldom has a President felt obliged after only seven weeks in office to deny publicly that his Administration suffers from "drift" and "malaise." But that is precisely what George Bush did at a press conference last week, reciting a list of accomplishments ranging from the savings and loans bailout to proposals for curbing air pollution. "I think we're on track," the President insisted, adding somewhat wistfully, "A lot is happening. Not all of it is good, but a lot is happening."

The biggest happening, and the worst for Bush, was the Senate's rejection of former Senator John Tower for Secretary of Defense by a vote of 53 to 47. It marked the first time in 30 years that the full Senate had spurned a President's Cabinet choice, and was a clear indication of which way the power is flowing along Pennsylvania Avenue. Bush moved swiftly to stanch the bleeding by replacing Tower with Congressman Richard Cheney, a Wyoming Republican who served as White House chief of staff under Gerald Ford. Cheney is expected to win quick FBI clearance and Senate confirmation -- much to the relief of Bush, who declared, "Too much time has been wasted here."

All week the President was at pains to counter critics who complain that too much time has already been wasted in this new Administration. Despite Bush's extensive experience in government and his campaign boast that he was "ready on day one to be a great President," hundreds of key appointive posts remain unfilled and crucial foreign policy decisions are on hold pending completion of some 30 "reviews."

In economic and domestic policy, the White House has been energetic but surprisingly maladroit, hopping among major and minor issues with little continuity or follow-through. The White House has also been inattentive about managing the news and delivering its message to the public, especially when compared with skills of the Reagan Administration or even with the "theme-of- the-day" Bush campaign. "The President has given nobody the overall authority to coordinate people's efforts and make sure things work around here," explains one senior Administration official. "And there's only so much that even a President as active as this one can keep track of. The rest is falling through the cracks."

The bright side of the Tower fiasco may be that it woke up the White House. "It has got Bush's attention focused," says an Administration official. An outside adviser says, "They've got a major bailout operation under way right now." On Tuesday night chief of staff John Sununu, ever confident and combative, sought advice from an informal group of outsiders that he occasionally convenes: a dozen former Bush campaign officials and political consultants who gathered for dinner in the Roosevelt Room and discussed how to recover from the debacle.

One solace was that for all the Administration's early failings and flailings, the President's popularity outside Washington has remained strong: his approval rating has ranged between 59% and 71% in recent polls. For the time being, the President can coast on a strong swell of national contentment and hope that interest rates don't climb too high. He also continues to benefit from his obvious enjoyment of the presidency, his self-deprecating humor, his grasp of the issues raised at press conferences.

Those who have worked closely with Bush say his best traits -- his energy, enthusiasm and gregariousness -- can be his worst enemies, sometimes leading him to strike out in all directions at once. Bush is most effective, associates say, when he has a strong and respected deputy to help him choose priorities and stick with them. He allowed campaign manager James Baker to play that role last fall, but in the White House he has so far denied such authority to Sununu. Bush entered the Oval Office determined to shed his image as an accident-prone candidate who needed extensive handling during the presidential race. He is equally determined not to look as sleepy or staff- managed as Ronald Reagan. As a result, Bush brought along no members of his superb campaign staff to the White House, "and that was very conscious on his part," says a former campaign official.

Unlike Reagan's chiefs, Sununu does not control the President's schedule, screen his phone calls or parcel out all staff assignments. Instead, Bush deals directly and informally with a wide range of aides, Cabinet secretaries and outside visitors. A senior Administration official observes that Bush operates as "his own chief of staff" in many ways, as well as "his own best intelligence agent."

During his eight years as Vice President, whenever Bush wanted to know what was really going on in Congress or California or Cairo, the former CIA director turned not only to his staff but also to an extensive network of friends, former aides and political allies, who would sometimes report back through special phone and mail channels that skirted his official staff. A former senior Bush staffer says he was "flabbergasted" to learn that the boss "had his own cutouts, just like a spymaster."

As President, Bush still loves to free-lance. He jots dozens of private notes, reluctant to rely on dictation. He makes and takes scores of phone calls each day, talking to an army of people in and out of government, from Congressmen to civil rights leaders to cronies from the Texas oil fields. He loves marginalia: recently he extensively edited a staff memo on Soviet- American relations.

One of Bush's senior aides and longtime tennis partners, former Harvard government professor Roger Porter, has written a book called Presidential Decision Making that could describe Bush in action. Porter dubs the style , "ad-hocracy," a management pattern that "relies heavily on the President to distribute assignments and select whom he listens to and when."

Among the advantages of ad-hocracy, says Porter, is that "it communicates the image of a President personally in command." Among the disadvantages: it "frequently results in jurisdictional battles," and since "ad-hocracy does not differentiate between major and minor issues," the President's agenda can easily get muddled. In an interview, Porter emphasized that "most new Presidents engage in ad hoc decision making." He sees Bush's curiosity and openness as strengths. Another Administration official adds that the easy access the President grants is "one of the reasons people love to work for him."

Still, ad hoc decisions can lead to posthaste confusion, as quickly became apparent on Capitol Hill. When the Tower nomination appeared to be doomed, White House counsel Boyden Gray, a longtime Bush favorite who often acts independently of others on the staff, pressed for postponement of a vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee. But at the same time, White House lobbyists were pressing for an early vote.

The Administration's issue agenda too is pulled in many directions at once. The peripatetic President delivers several speeches a week, and sometimes several a day, on subjects as diverse as drugs, volunteerism, government service, ethics, education, child care and the minimum wage. On the morning after his Feb. 9 budget address, he flew to Canada. Then he exhausted his staff (though not himself) on a whirlwind five-day tour to Japan, China and South Korea, including formal meetings with two dozen foreign leaders that required extensive preparation and diverted the Administration from the efforts to confirm Tower and to fill other vacant posts.

This scattershot approach makes it difficult to achieve the cynically effective manipulation of TV coverage that was a hallmark of the Reagan Administration. Sununu and White House imagemeister Steve Studdert express disdain for the obsessive attention to television and press coverage under Reagan. But a former top Reagan official points out that "control of the evening news and the headlines is one of the few tools available" for a President who was elected without any specific mandate, whose political opposition controls both houses of Congress, and who has little federal money with which to buy votes.

Richard Neustadt, Harvard's eminent scholar on the presidency, raises a more disturbing point about this -- or any -- new Administration's public relations efforts. Neustadt, who believes the early criticism of Bush is unfair, wonders "whether the control of the electronic media that Ronald Reagan perfected now requires that the President become more passive and turn much of his schedule over to his media planners."

When the Tower nomination foundered, an inordinate share of the blame began falling on Sununu for his lack of Washington experience and his abrasive personality. Many of the Tower snafus, however, were beyond Sununu's control, as are most of the tensions in the structure of the Bush White House. Several Administration officials expect that this spring training crisis could even strengthen Sununu's hand as Bush realizes he needs someone to run stronger interference for him. Already Sununu has adopted the system used by Bush's vice-presidential chief of staff, in which subordinates are under strict orders to report any assignment or information they receive from Bush. But now that he is President, Bush's staff and contacts are so large, and some of them so independent of Sununu, that the system often fails.

Bush and his aides seem to be realizing that the presidency is too wide a stage to control by ad-hocracy. The trick will be to impose coherence without stifling the President's spontaneity. If the White House can do so, it should be able to recover quickly from the Tower disaster. Otherwise, barely halfway to his 100-day mark, America's 41st President may become hostage to outside events and forces.

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington