Clinton's People

By MARGARET CARLSON WASHINGTON

AS HE WALKS IN A SOFT DRIZZLE TO his car next to the campaign headquarters in Little Rock, George Stephanopoulos hardly seems like a major player in any drama -- much less a presidential succession. Described by his colleague and close friend Paul Begala as a guy "well over four feet tall slumming in a jeans jacket with an MTV haircut," he has, at 31, leaped ahead of his elders to be at the red-hot center of the Clinton universe. While everyone knows who he is -- his face is now beamed round the world as transition communications director -- it is hard to figure out how someone so self-effacing ended up where he is.

In 1988 he worked on Michael Dukakis' campaign as head of the "rapid response" team, a wildly misnomered unit that reacted to Bush's assaults by dreaming up counterattacks that the candidate then rarely delivered. His main job, Stephanopoulos jokes, was to serve as a sounding board for one-liners to see if they would get a laugh. "I was just another short, over-smart Greek without a sense of humor."

Still, he made enough of a reputation for himself that in 1991 he was wooed by both the Bob Kerrey and Clinton campaigns. Stephanopoulos recalls the instant rapport that he felt during his first meeting with Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg. "Midway through the interview," says Stephanopoulos, "I started working for him."

This time around, his fantasies became the campaign. After traveling at Clinton's side through the primaries, Stephanopoulos settled last May into a messy office with two banks of phones. He became Clinton incarnate, so imbued with the candidate's philosophy and policy that when he spoke it was as if Clinton were there. "He made everything happen," says media consultant Mandy Grunwald. To mainline the candidate's unfiltered personality to the voters, Stephanopoulos orchestrated appearances on talk shows and MTV. He pulled together Clinton's compendium of economic solutions, Putting People First, a task that required him to ride herd on a disparate group of economic advisers, all of whom thought they possessed the cure for the deficit and the qualities to be Treasury Secretary.

Begala recalls screaming at Stephanopoulos not to allow network star Ted Koppel onto the plane to do a special on the campaign's last 48 hours, since it wouldn't air until after the election. "But George's argument was that when you see Clinton unhandled and unproduced, people like him. And he was thinking down the road. That's my definition of vision: anybody who can think beyond Election Day."

With an intellect unencumbered by a comparable ego, Stephanopoulos was able to bridge the chasm separating the campaign's often mismatched personalities. He made sure that Hollywood's laid-back producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who made the convention bio-film, was on speaking terms with chain-smoking, laser-intense Grunwald; he doled out face time on television among aspiring talking heads; not least, he soothed the brilliant, tightly coiled gonzo strategist James Carville by watching infomercials and Julia Child with him when Carville was too nervous to work.

In return for the companionship, Carville agreed to put his thoughts into full sentences on paper, and thus turned out the basic working document for the general campaign in June. "We never had a cross word despite my spending most of my waking hours with him in the most intense endeavor on the planet. With other people, I have cross words about every five minutes," says Carville crossly. "Let's put it this way: I wish I had a daughter because I would want her to marry George."

Stephanopoulos developed his selflessness as the grandson and son of Greek Orthodox priests, expected to be above reproach -- a child impersonating a grown-up. "A lot of priest's kids go bad, go wild, can't stand the strain of the scrutiny of the flock looking at them," says Begala. "George clearly was up to it." His too-good-to-be-true face looks out from a gallery of photos lining the wall of his parents' apartment on New York City's East 74th Street, next to the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Archdiocesan Cathedral, where his father serves as dean. There is little George in his white-and-gold altar-boy robes next to Archbishop Iakovos. There he is, poised and smiling, accepting the Truman scholarship from Margaret Truman, and robed again as the salutatorian at Columbia University.

Now the perfect child who once wanted to be a priest is grown up and, despite the Italian cut of his suits, still looks as if his mother dresses him in the morning and tousles his hair before sending him off. Critics think the soft-spoken Stephanopoulos has insufficient heft to speak for the President; yet this brooding, dark presence has a quiet authority. His power whisper makes people lean into him, like plants reaching toward the sun.

Stephanopoulos has little time these days for his Stairmaster workouts or visits to his girlfriend, a Philadelphia lawyer. He is looking to move out of his Adams Morgan apartment and into a new place. Gripped by his well-known pessimism -- when he wasn't saying, "That's my fault" during the campaign, he was intoning, "It's over" -- he couldn't let himself believe that Clinton had won until 5 p.m. on Election Day. "I called the mansion with a huge case of butterflies because I knew I wouldn't be talking to the same person anymore. I was on the speakerphone and said I didn't know what to call him, and Hillary said, 'Just call him Bill.' But, of course, I can't. When I'm talking about him, I say President-elect, but when I'm talking to him I still call him Governor. It now seems like a nickname, a term of endearment."

With reporting by Priscilla Painton/New York