ENTER THE ALTER EGO

By NANCY GIBBS

When Bill Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, he brought his kindergarten friend Mack McLarty with him as his right hand. That didn't work out very well. Four years later, his new chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, is a man he first met in 1992, and bonded with so close, so fast that even Bowles' admirers have to reach deep into the couch for an explanation. Bowles, says a White House aide, is what a 10-year-old Clinton would have considered a successful real grownup: "He has money, real self-assurance, he knows what he is in the world, and has class." Asked last year whom Clinton trusts, an aide answered, "Hillary." And then, after a pause, "and Erskine."

Bowles' appointment--and the manner in which it was made--is the clearest ideological statement about Clinton's second term since his election-night promise to govern from "the vital center." Clinton has turned over the most important job in the White House to a pro-business centrist who pushed hard for a balanced budget, advocated cutting a deal with Republicans and was an internal ally of the liberals' pariah, the consultant Dick Morris. If there were any doubts left, they disappeared when liberal-in-chief Harold Ickes read in the papers about how he was being passed over for the job before he heard anything from the President.

Clinton and Bowles met four years ago, when Bowles volunteered himself to the campaign the day Clinton lost the Connecticut primary. Bowles soon became a heavyweight fund raiser in North Carolina, where he was a successful investment banker. He had been to Washington only a couple of times in his life before he moved up in 1993 to take over the dispirited, endangered Small Business Administration. His wife, textile magnate Crandall Close Bowles, stayed behind in Charlotte with their three children, which left Bowles with little better to do than spend 15 hours a day at the office. He invited employees to E-mail him and answered every message personally. He visited SBA personnel in the hospital. He figured out how to take a 20% budget cut and still increase the number of loans, shedding headquarters jobs to put more people in district offices. It was a crash course for someone who had never worked outside the private sector. "I managed in the public environment, but off-Broadway," he says. "Not every mistake came under the microscope."

By 1994 Clinton had moved him over to deputy chief of staff, a hall monitor assigned the job of imposing order on a White House that sometimes seemed like a rainy Saturday at the Discovery Zone. He analyzed Clinton's schedule and deduced that a shocking amount of his time was spent on meetings and phone calls rather than thinking and planning. Bowles urged Clinton's schedulers to carve some undisturbed office time into his day. He made sure that the right people got to meetings and that they started and ended on time. And he worked assiduously to plug leaks, taking his yellow highlighter to anonymous quotes and confronting the suspects. "He was trying to enforce the rules of the game," says a White House aide. "You keep your mouth shut unless you're authorized to open it. The place became a lot tighter."

Bowles quickly earned a reputation for both rigor and grace. It was Bowles who coordinated the government's response to the Oklahoma City bombing, who integrated Morris into the White House when other top staff members were gunning for him in early 1995, and who negotiated Morris' resignation in the middle of the Democratic Convention. And unlike the other strivers, Bowles, given his happy and lucrative alternatives, had the added virtue of not wanting to stay in his job forever.

In a White House conspicuously short of addicted golfers, Bowles had special access to the President during his purest moments for reflection. The two of them would often leave the White House at 5:30 and play through sundown. "We've played the last hole in the dark many times," says Bowles, who is reported to be a far better player than the President. The two men have in common their Southern ambition and a childhood in a household with an alcoholic parent (Clinton's stepfather, Bowles' mother, long since recovered). But the pair are opposites in many ways. "I spent my whole life in the private sector, he in the public," observes Bowles. "Some of my greatest strengths are in organization and structure; he is a freer thinker than I am." Clinton has always been a showboater; Bowles was forever modest. One of his prep-school teachers stuck a note in his school file praising his respectful manners with a prescient metaphor: "When you're in a duck blind with him and he shoots the bird out from under you, he will make you feel like it was your shot at the bird."

The question now is whether those skills make him the right man for the job at this time. Outgoing chief Leon Panetta is a master legislator who knows his way around the Hill and knows how lawmakers want to be treated. Bowles has none of that personal experience or policy savvy, a disadvantage in dealing with a bitter Republican Congress and a bruising budget fight. "He doesn't suffer fools gladly," says Doug Sosnik, Clinton's political director. "That may not always serve him well in Washington."

It's the job of a chief of staff to tee up decisions for the President and to take care of the ones he shouldn't be bothered with. The role requires someone with strong political judgment, not an honest broker--unless Clinton himself plans to spend more time down in the weeds this term. "The White House makes ideas, it makes policies," says a senior official. "Erskine would come and ask us what we need"--as a good manager might ask subordinates in a business--"and people would look back at him kind of baffled. What they needed was an answer--what does the President want to do?"

Of course, in the Clinton White House, even smooth transitions can be rough. Jesse Jackson was calling every day to talk about who would get what job, and women's groups and Hispanics wondered noisily whether the "vital center" of Clinton's second term would include any of them. Bowles had barely arrived in his temporary quarters in the Old Executive Office Building when he was locked in a strange battle with Panetta for control of the transition. Panetta, despite his East Room farewell last week, wasn't going away quietly, bird-dogging the nightly transition meeting and proving slow to cede authority to his courtly successor. "There are advantages and disadvantages to this," says a White House official. "The advantage is that you have continuity and overlap. The disadvantage is that you have two chiefs of staff."

--Reported by Michael Duffy and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh

With reporting by MICHAEL DUFFY AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WASHINGTON AND LISA H. TOWLE/RALEIGH