That Sinking Feeling

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON

Bill Clinton knew the House vote on his economic package was going to be close, but he didn't expect it to go down to the last 30 seconds.

As the House of Representatives began to vote on his $246 billion deficit- reduction plan last Thursday night, Clinton calculated that he had perhaps one or two votes more than the 217 he needed for passage. But halfway into the 15-minute voting period, two Democrats the White House thought it had won over, James Hayes of Alabama and Tim Johnson of South Dakota, voted nay. Instantly, Clinton's margin disappeared. On Capitol Hill a nervous Howard Paster, the top Clinton lobbyist, telephoned White House chief of staff Thomas ("Mack") McLarty in the Oval Office. Mack, he said, "what's happening to our strategy?"

McLarty told his boss the news, and in the next moment, Clinton saw his presidency pass before his eyes. His margin was evaporating, and with it faded his plans for cutting the deficit, reordering public priorities and overhauling the nation's health-care system. For a moment, Clinton looked utterly defeated. "I know the look in his eyes," said McLarty later. "It looked like 1980 ((when as Arkansas Governor he lost his first re-election bid)). It was a look of sadness and disappointment and anxiousness."

Then he snapped out of it. Clinton quickly telephoned Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana and promised to tinker with the energy tax. He called Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, who had been holding out all day: in return for a yes vote, he agreed to make additional spending cuts and shift his policies to the political center. McCurdy pressed McLarty in a separate call to see if Clinton would really deliver. "He gets it now," said the chief of staff. With 30 seconds left, McCurdy, Tauzin and several other holdouts fell in line. The final tally was 219-213; Clinton's package survived by a six-vote margin.

But Clinton's narrow victory is the only bright spot in a presidency that has been beset since its inception by miscalculations and self-inflicted wounds. Clinton, in fact, was still stumbling from the missteps of the preceding week. His balmy decision to have his hair trimmed on Air Force One by a Beverly Hills coiffeur put the presidential scalp in national headlines, while a cronyism scandal in the White House travel office pitted Clinton's staff against the Justice Department. Later Secretary of State Warren Christopher had to telephone news organizations to contradict a speech by a top aide who had stated in public what many had been saying in private for weeks: under Clinton, the U.S. was retreating from leadership in the world.

After a week of desperately seeking advice on how best to right his troubled Administration, Clinton turned to an unexpected source for help: a Republican. On Saturday he tapped David Gergen, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses, to join his staff. Gergen, a commentator, replaces communications director George Stephanopoulos as Clinton's top spokesman, and is expected to help Clinton emphasize the moderate, centrist themes on which he campaigned. Even this decision was made in typical Clinton fashion: without much warning, late at night, and with a last-minute O.K. from Hillary Rodham Clinton. In an interview with CNN on Saturday morning, Gergen quickly made it clear that he will work to reposition his new boss in the political middle. "I think the President wants to be more centrist," he said.

Stephanopoulos becomes a senior adviser to Clinton, responsible for managing the President's battles with Congress. Though the budget fight took the White House to the brink, staffers say they realize it is a walk in the park compared with either the looming budget battle in the Senate or the costly overhaul of the health-care system that Clinton wants Congress to consider as soon as its work on the budget is complete.

All that will have to be accomplished while Clinton's popularity with voters continues to decline. According to a new TIME/CNN poll, only 36% of the public approves of Clinton's handling of his job, a record low for a postwar President four months into his first term. Meanwhile, for the first time, fully 50% of the public disapproves of his performance as President. Dismayed by Clinton's preference for taxes over spending cuts, 58% of the public believes Clinton is a "tax-and-spend liberal." Such dismal ratings will make it easier for legislators to abandon the President in future contests. "At this moment," said a top political adviser, "nobody is afraid of him, and he has to find a way to change that."

Clinton can take heart from the fact that presidential popularity is an extremely volatile substance. George Bush won an 89% approval rating after the Gulf War in March 1991, but 10 months later it had dropped by half. Clinton can reflect that the polls can just as easily bounce the other way: he has plenty of time to recover from his error-filled start. Still, intimates say Clinton has been "sobered" by "how fast and how far he has fallen." Though most of them continue to insist the President seems to enjoy tough challenges, his advisers say they can detect the stress. Says one confidant: "He says he is fine. But he doesn't sound fine."

After months of light jabs, billionaire gadfly Ross Perot threw a wild, roundhouse punch last week, suggesting Bill Clinton is unqualified for high office and stating that he "wouldn't consider giving him a job anywhere above middle management." While Perot's characterization seems severe, the criticism about Clinton's administrative skills is echoed in private by some of his closest associates and colleagues. Said one, to whom Clinton turned last week for late-night advice: "His management style . . . just doesn't work at this level of government."

That has been painfully apparent in the past two weeks. To build on the House victory, say senior Democrats and many Cabinet officials, Clinton must quickly reshuffle his White House. Gergen's arrival is a curious first step in that direction. Whether a Reagan Republican, even one moderated by years on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, can effectively lead a band of young, fiercely partisan White House communications operatives is far from certain. Gergen says he is "convinced" Clinton wants to "run a bipartisan government." But other than Gergen's appointment itself, there has been scant evidence of any commitment to the middle.

Even with Gergen, Clinton will still rely on a staff that has almost no White House or executive experience. Political director Rahm Emanuel, a campaign fund raiser, is unsuited as a party enforcer and is widely blamed for being too enamored of Hollywood for the President's good. White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, a former Watergate committee staff lawyer who gave Hillary Rodham Clinton her first job, is seen by almost everyone in the White House as a political bumbler who has given his boss poor guidance on a host of matters from the nominations of Zoe Baird and Lani Guinier to the travel-office flap. Even congressional lobbyist Paster, one of the few officials with deep Washington experience, is too closely allied with the liberal House leadership for many House moderates and Senators.

Other people are simply in over their heads -- literally, in some cases. Clinton asked Arkansas chum Bruce Lindsey to oversee the appointments process and remain at his side on trips out of town. But Lindsey is so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of paper crossing his desk that he has resorted to a method of filing that consists of crisscrossing documents as they came in: one sideways, one straight, one sideways and so on. When one stack grew too tall, he started another. When he ran out of flat surfaces, he added to a previous stack. Soon the stacks collapsed of their own weight and toppled into one another, scattering layers of undifferentiated documents from one end of his office to the other in a kind of latter-day paper Pompeii. Staffers joke that only by sinking exploratory shafts can Lindsey be found each night. Partly as a result, the appointments process is a sea of chaos. "Bruce," said one, "is in a world of his own."

Nor did Clinton help himself by turning to three agreeable men to be his top aides. In McLarty, Clinton has chosen a chief of staff who has either been unwilling or unable to exert much discipline on the President or his staff. Deputy chief of staff Mark Gearan is well liked, but as one campaign consultant put it, "If Mack or Mark were really angry at you, you wouldn't wet your pants. So how scared do you think Danny Rostenkowski is going to be?" Clinton tried to remedy the situation by putting Gore aide Roy Neel in charge of "day to day" operations four weeks ago, but he is a soft touch too -- and still lacks an office, a desk or a phone in the White House.

While the staff can be blamed for some of the confusion, even his closest advisers insist that Clinton is a big part of the problem. "A lot of it can't be laid at anyone's doorstep but his own," said one last week. Democratic Party elders admit to being stunned by Clinton's judgment lately. Having his $200 haircut and allowing a Hollywood producer to work out of a White House office and then intervene on behalf of friends to win White House air-charter business have done serious damage to his public standing. "The best politician the Democratic Party has turned up in a long time turns out to have a tin ear," said a longtime friend. "He has squandered his moral authority with a lot of this stuff. It leads people to say, 'This man isn't really a populist; he is a phony, a fraud.' And though this perception is completely wrong in substance, it is enormously damaging and has to be dealt with. He has to regain the moral authority to call people to sacrifice."

The same officials say Clinton has spent too much time courting the left wing of the Democratic Party when he should be building ties to the middle. After promising to cut taxes on the middle class and "end welfare as we know it," Clinton has proposed a host of tax increases and disguised hefty new spending programs as "investments." Rather than reduce entitlements, he nearly succeeded in creating a program to provide free immunization for children, regardless of income. Asked last week if Clinton really was a "New Democrat," Oklahoma Senator David Boren replied, "That's the $64,000 question. We just don't know."

Just as troubling is Clinton's apparent resistance to discipline. He has extended automatic walk-in rights to the Oval Office -- a privilege that is heavily restricted by most Presidents -- to nearly a dozen people: Hillary, McLarty, Lindsey, Gore, Stephanopoulos, Neel, Nussbaum, economic chief Bob Rubin, personal assistant Nancy Hernreich and National Security Adviser Tony Lake. The open-door policy has forced him to be his own chief of staff and caused the White House to move in too many directions at once, with little coordination.

Clinton promised to refocus his presidency on the economy after his $16 billion stimulus package was defeated in the Senate in April. But this vow proved short-lived: his aides bombarded House leaders last week with demands that they take action next month on enterprise zones, a crime bill and a community bank-lending measure. When a Democratic lawmaker asked the President last week to "stop the policy-a-day nonsense," the room full of lawmakers burst into applause.

In public Clinton is little better: his speeches continue to be leviathan, rambling affairs, the result of his tendency to veer from his text as much as he sticks to it. Oval Office meetings that should take a few minutes often go on for hours. A brief update session last month on potential Supreme Court nominees that was scheduled to last 10 minutes dragged on for two hours as Clinton talked through the philosophies of various candidates. "He really loves the intellectual give-and-take," said an official. "But the time pressures and political pressures are such that he can't afford that anymore."

The President has difficulty closing the deal. A recent health-care policy meeting dragged on for four hours, only to have him get up and leave the room without arriving at a decision. Last week Clinton met with three different groups of lawmakers at the White House to make his case for the budget plan. But in the session with freshmen Democrats, the pitch was all soft sell, and in the more important session with 30 Democratic whips, he never asked for the whips' support. That oversight staggered several who attended. "He didn't nail the whips," said a Congressman. "It shows that he is a little politically naive."

One quality of presidential character is knowing what you don't know. Ronald Reagan relied on James Baker, and George Bush turned to John Sununu, because both Presidents knew they lacked the rigor required to run the Executive Branch alone. Clinton refuses to admit that he cannot do it all himself. "They need someone who can maintain iron discipline, who will look at the schedule and take a red pen to anything that isn't about the economy," said a senior Democrat. But Clinton needs someone who can also discipline Clinton. Says a close friend of 25 years: "They've got to get somebody to manage the President, hands on, full time. This is a guy who has to be told to do his homework and eat his spinach and get to places on time."

Last Wednesday evening Christopher and longtime adviser Vernon Jordan met with Clinton and conveyed many of these same points (though Jordan reportedly used more pungent language). Late last week several senior White House officials said it was likely that New York lawyer Harold Ickes, who ran the Democratic Convention in New York City last summer, would join the White House staff in some capacity within a month. Already a frequent visitor to the White House, Ickes is regarded as someone whom Clinton trusts and who has the political acumen to stop the White House's free fall. But he will be able to do nothing if Clinton is not willing to be bridled. Said a top Cabinet official: "It doesn't matter if he changes his players if he doesn't change the way he does business."

Clinton's win in the House would have been broader had public opinion -- led by the deficit-reduction seminars conducted by Ross Perot and by Clinton at his December economic summit -- not moved far ahead of the President in January. The first sign that the Great Listener had lost touch with the public's willingness to sacrifice came in February, when Clinton unveiled a budget that delivered nearly $500 billion worth of deficit reductions but did so primarily through tax increases, not spending reductions. Then in April a $16 billion pork-laden "stimulus" package failed to win Senate approval. "The country moved ahead of us on spending cuts," said a Cabinet officer, "and most of the Congress is as surprised by it as we are."

% Two weeks ago, it seemed as if history was about to repeat itself. As the House prepared to take up the President's 1994 budget, Clinton once more faced a mini-revolt by a group of 40 moderate Democrats, led by Congressman Charles Stenholm of Texas, who demanded a stiff cap on entitlement spending to keep the deficit under control. Liberals, led by members of the black and Hispanic caucuses, promised to bolt if Clinton gave the moderates an inch. Round-the- clock talks between the two camps were helping Clinton maintain a shaky majority in the House. But at one point last Tuesday afternoon, Stenholm suffered an attack of cold feet, and the talks broke down.

Poring over a maze of call sheets and whip counts at his Oval Office desk, Clinton saw his thin majority evaporate into a crushing 30-vote defeat. He looked up and appealed to higher powers. "Where are the votes going to come from now?" he implored. "Where are we going to get them? They're just not there."

Majority leader Richard Gephardt intervened to keep Stenholm at the table, and talks continued through Wednesday. But the negotiations broke down four or five more times during the next 36 hours, and it wasn't until 1 a.m. Thursday that Gephardt and Stenholm found a solution. White House officials later praised Stenholm, noting that he kept the rebellion "in the family and did not go looking for votes in the G.O.P."

Meanwhile the Cabinet was getting rebellious too. Many of the agency chiefs were bewildered that their boss was struggling for survival without their help. Some had been cut out of key strategy sessions, and others had not spoken to Clinton for weeks except in passing or on other matters. When the President finally sat down with his counselors to ask for help, several complained that Clinton would never prevail in Washington if he continued to send inexperienced White House aides to lobby elected officials. "When I was in Congress," said one, "I made sure I never talked to White House staffers. But when a member of the Cabinet called, I cleared my schedule."

Within hours, in a tone of firmness bordering on desperation, White House Cabinet secretary Christine Varney told counterparts at federal agencies that Clinton had decided "there is nothing any Cabinet Secretary is doing for the next two days that's more important than lobbying Congress." Working from White House lists of undecided lawmakers, Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy telephoned farm-state Representatives. Defense Secretary Les Aspin worked Congressmen with major military installations in their states. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt buttonholed Western lawmakers. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen reasoned with the Texas delegation. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor concentrated on Californians. During the next two days, the Clinton Administration bought, rented and bartered for every vote it could find. One Cabinet officer described his mission plainly: "Find out what these Congressmen want, and if possible give it to them."

No price was too high or too low: parks, highways and other pork projects served as common currency. As many as 15 lawmakers from peanut-producing states switched when the White House agreed to curb the flow of imported Chinese peanut butter -- at a steep cost to American consumers. Clinton promised to toughen his policy toward Haiti to woo several black lawmakers. One telephone conversation between a Cabinet officer and an undecided lawmaker went like this: "Congressman, I'm sitting here chewing my fingers and wondering what else we can do to win this vote. I know you've talked to the President, and he wanted me to remind you how important this vote is to him and our party and our country. He knows this is a tough vote for you, and he and I both want you to know that if you can be with us, we won't forget it . . . Well, yes, I think we can help with your project. Can I set up a meeting with you on that for next week?"

The bartering continued Thursday, the day of the big vote. Pennsylvania Congressman Ron Klink of Pittsburgh opposed the energy tax and the effect it would have on steelmakers in his district. He had campaigned against higher taxes and had told Clinton two days earlier that the bill would hurt his district. On Thursday morning Klink extracted a promise from the President that steel producers would get a tax rebate for steel exports, helping Klink's constituents compete in foreign markets. By 4 p.m. Thursday, Clinton "hit the wall," said an aide who was present, still three votes short. Between the hours of 7 and 9 that night, while downing a huge hamburger and a plate of French fries, the President promised to play golf with three different Congressmen sometime this summer. The numbers kept moving, right down to the last 30 seconds. When it was over, Clinton and his aides looked around the Oval Office with a mixture of relief and astonishment. "That was the closest vote of my life," remarked Bentsen, who spent 28 years in Congress.

- In spite of the odds against them, Clinton's team is oddly sanguine about the coming Senate fight, set to begin on June 7 when the Finance Committee takes up the House-passed bill. The chief obstacle is Boren, from oil-rich Oklahoma, who opposes the energy tax and is the pivotal vote on the panel. Administration officials believe they may still pick off Boren, but Democrats on Capitol Hill are already talking darkly of retribution if he doesn't fall into line. One likely target: the Senator, regarded as pompous and self- important even by Senate standards, helped create the David L. Boren National Security Education program, which provides scholarships to graduates. "It's not a big thing," said one aide, "but it's a big thing to Boren."

Bentsen and McLarty worked steadily behind the scenes last week to keep Louisiana Senator John Breaux quiet about his objections to the energy tax until the House vote was safely over. But eventually they realized they might do better enlisting the Senator to help broker a compromise to lessen the BTU tax's impact. Officials said House members' reservations would be taken into account when the Senate marks up its measure.

Clinton will hit the road again, trying to concentrate more on selling his program and less on everything else. Senior officials have discussed ways to nudge the President to the right in the coming weeks, such as by nominating a moderate Supreme Court Justice, dropping the controversial and probably doomed nomination of Lani Guinier to be Assistant Attorney General for civil rights and perhaps even suggesting additional budget cuts. There is also talk of "doing what it takes" to circumvent Clinton's vaunted 25% cut in White House staff. "You have to make adjustments where you can," said one official.

But there is little evidence that Clinton will go along with such steps. If he fails to adjust quickly, he will confirm the widespread belief that the biggest problem with the Clinton presidency is Clinton himself. Unless he can, as he likes to say, make change his friend, he is in for a decidedly unfriendly 3 1/2 years.

With reporting by Margaret Carlson, Dan Goodgame and Nancy Traver/Washington