How They Run The Show

By JAMES CARNEY AND KAREN TUMULTY

Only the hardest decisions make it all the way to the President's desk. That's something both men who are running have had a chance to see from front-row seats. "It's a revelation," says Al Gore, "the way excruciating, world-class problems tend to come in clusters." And George W. Bush knows from seeing his father renege on his "no new taxes" pledge how a single judgment can end up crippling a presidency. So, says Governor Bush, "you just gotta be confident enough in your positions and tough enough in your hide to be able to stand the heat if it comes."

It is impossible to know precisely what problems George W. Bush or Al Gore will face as President, but there surely will be some that nobody will have anticipated. What is also certain is that the two would bring dramatically different approaches to solving them. Bush comes to a decision by putting his faith in the advisers he picks; Gore, in the information they bring him. Bush's goal in mastering a new issue is to learn the lay of the land; Gore isn't convinced he knows the terrain until he runs his fingers through the soil. Bush's experience tells him there are few adversaries he cannot bring around with his irresistible charm; Gore's experience tells him there are few he cannot conquer with an irrefutable argument.

The two men who would like to be the next President are so different in their management styles that it's easy to overlook their similarities. But there are some. Both Gore and Bush have earned reputations as decisive leaders--more decisive, in each case, than the men whose presidencies they've watched up close. Bill Clinton's penchant for agonizing over every decision--and then rethinking it again after it was made--only reinforced the Vice President's natural aversion to second-guessing. A President Gore would be a decided contrast to the candidate who reinvents his campaign as often as he changes his wardrobe. "Once he locks in, he'll lock in and be much tougher to move, whereas Bill Clinton used to continue to cogitate even after he made a decision," says former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta.

Bush's father rarely looked back on decisions, but he often took his time in making them. His son, on the other hand, became famous in Texas for cutting meetings short, demanding a cogent recommendation from his advisers, making a decision and moving on. Bush also has less patience with the status quo than his father did. If Bush the elder's governing philosophy was "first, do no harm," then his son's is "do something." Since his first campaign in Texas in 1994, George W.'s style has been to develop a limited, specific agenda and then focus almost exclusively on it until he could check all the items off the list. "He realizes that if you have too many goals, you don't have any goals," says Bush campaign chairman Don Evans. What's more, some advisers suggest, Bush plans to push the hardest ones first: his gaudy tax cut, they say, will probably take a backseat to the arduous work of transforming Social Security.

Neither Gore nor Bush has much patience for the sort of bull sessions that seem to energize and nourish the current President. Gore invites discussion but listens to it in a different way--more focused than Clinton on finding an answer, but less attuned to understanding what it takes to sell it politically. "Clinton sits there as a judge hearing arguments," says someone who has worked closely with both men, "while Gore wants to absorb data. Gore has a much more scientific approach, is much more likely to believe that there's an analytically correct and incorrect answer, and Clinton's much more likely to see the answer as a choice between competing values and points of view: who it helps, who it doesn't help."

The Vice President is often ahead of his staff on the details, probing and prodding, picking at an argument like a loose thread on a sweater to see if he can make it unravel. He can be a difficult boss, and new staff members find out quickly whether they will make it or not with Gore. Says a former aide: "If you weren't sure of yourself, you gave him wrong or half-baked information or for some reason he questioned your loyalty--if any of those things occurred--it just wouldn't happen." And Gore, once a newspaper reporter, respects deadlines, unlike Clinton, who has been known to finish writing his State of the Union addresses on the limousine ride to the Capitol. "Gore won't be there at 6 a.m. on Christmas Eve trying to choose five Cabinet members and changing the Attorney General pick for the fourth time," says an adviser.

If Gore is methodical, Bush is intuitive. When asked about decision making, the Governor's first response is to talk up the importance of "picking a team of people you can trust." A former CEO, Bush views government through the eyes of a businessman. He delegates authority, empowers his staff member and trusts them to give the advice he needs to make a decision. He prefers short memos and brisk discussions. He doesn't pretend to know the details his experts are supposed to know, and he often makes a decision based on how effectively an aide argues for it. "He wants you to come in with a recommendation," says Clay Johnson, a friend since boarding school who is one of Bush's top aides in Texas. "He doesn't want you to give him a 20-page report and say, 'Read this and think about it.'" Details matter, Bush says, "but I will not get bogged down micromanaging an issue."

The risk to this approach, says Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas political scientist, is that Bush may be too staff- reliant: "The problem is that he may not always be in a position to discern the credibility of the options his advisers give him. One of the ways a staff can manipulate the boss is to stack options so that their preferred option is obviously better." Bush insists he can sense when a staff member is trying to roll him.

Inevitably and sometimes exasperatingly, the bulk of a President's day is spent in meetings. And while Bush chafes at that prospect, he isn't daunted by it: "I don't like to sit around in meetings for hours and hours and hours. I get to the point. I think the ability to run a good meeting is a sign of good leadership," he says. The typical Bush meeting begins with an adviser making a presentation. But instead of listening patiently, Bush interrupts, peppering the adviser with questions. Sometimes the questions seem startlingly basic. During a briefing last year by defense experts, Bush stunned the room when he asked, "What's an army for?" "At first you had the feeling, 'Uh-oh, this guy's not so bright,'" recalls a participant. What it took advisers a moment to realize was that Bush was being deliberately provocative--forcing them to step back from the immediate issues in order to explain the fundamental assumptions behind America's defense strategy.

Gore, when he's trying to get his hands around something important, goes through two stages. In the first, he gobbles up facts and ideas, holding information against theory and gauging how the two fit. "When working on international economics, Gore will think about everything from business-management theory to chemical thermodynamics to financial-market theory, all in the space of a 20-minute speech-preparation meeting," says Harvard law professor Christopher Edley, an occasional adviser. Gore studies an issue until he can argue all sides with such certainty that aides sometimes have no idea which one he will ultimately take. But then the Vice President reaches what Leon Fuerth, his longtime foreign policy adviser, calls a "firing point." The meetings get smaller, shorter and more focused, a forced march to a conclusion. And sometimes Gore's conclusion is an idea that wasn't on the table in the first place: after spending more than a year studying the arms race as a young Congressman in the 1980s, Gore latched onto a proposal that split the difference between the cold warriors and the nuclear-disarmament camp, a single-warhead missile dubbed the Midgetman. Gore's plan helped produce a compromise that united Ronald Reagan with moderate Democrats on reviving the MX missile.

In many ways, of course, making the decision is the easy part. Even the best idea or policy proposal is worthless if the President can't sell it--to the Congress and the public. This is what Bush's supporters believe is their man's greatest strength, an affable, intimate manner that sent even Democrats in Texas into a swoon. And it's where Gore's allies have their deepest qualms, particularly amid a campaign where he has been unable to close what should have been the easiest of deals, persuading contented voters to stick with the team that presided over eight years of prosperity.

Gore has always been at his best in a policy fight and has often had a keener sense than those around him of which fights to pick. He argued, for instance, that Bill Clinton should engage the Republicans by offering a balanced budget in 1995 (a move that enraged congressional Democrats); in the government shutdowns that ensued, Gore counseled switching course and standing firm against them. Both moves worked, the first giving Clinton the credibility he needed to pull off the second. "Gore basically realized that the Republicans did not want to deal--that they wanted a surrender, but not a deal," says Dick Morris, who was advising Clinton at the time. "Clinton constantly thought there could be a deal, was constantly floating out proposals and ways to cut the knot."

But while he can figure out the inside moves, Gore lacks Clinton's instinctive feel for the larger game. The problem with Gore's presidential campaign is not that he has retooled himself but that voters can practically hear the gears grinding as he does it. "Al sometimes thinks he can study and learn everything--like empathy and sympathy," says a former aide.

Some are worried that the isolation of the Oval Office would reinforce Gore's political weaknesses. "He kind of runs his own show," Panetta says of Gore. "He doesn't have a senior group of elders that he talks to for guidance. If there's one recommendation I would make to the new Administration, it's that he should develop that, because the job is enough of an island."

Bush's advisers say the Governor would cope with the isolation of the presidency by reaching out--and not just to fellow Republicans. The essence of Bush's message in the closing days of the campaign is that he is a "different kind of Republican" who will "change the tone in Washington" by working with both Republicans and Democrats. Bush places great faith in his capacity to find common ground with the other party, and he points to his record of bipartisan compromise in Texas as proof that he would be able to do just that in Washington. But Texas Democrats are a conservative bunch, a different breed from their counterparts on Capitol Hill. After he was elected in 1994, Bush forged a close relationship with the late Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, a crusty Democrat with enormous power in Austin. But even a close Bush ally in Washington conceded last week that Richard Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, "is no Bob Bullock. [Bush] will reach out to Democrats, but they aren't going to reach back just because he's a nice guy."

And if Bush begins to bargain away parts of his agenda in order to compromise with Democrats, he may find himself with a bigger problem in his party. Conservative congressional Republicans have held their tongues through the campaign, rarely complaining about the distance Bush keeps from them. But that won't last if Bush wins and the G.O.P. retains control of Congress. "Tom DeLay gets the joke," says a senior Bush adviser, referring to the House G.O.P.'s enforcer. "He knows that if Bush wins, he'll be sitting with his feet up on the Truman balcony [with the President]. He'll be the second most powerful Republican in Washington. Maybe the first."

The most successful Presidents are the ones who can capitalize on their strengths and grow out of their weaknesses. Certainly, today's Clinton White House bears little resemblance to the chaotic, shapeless operation it was in its first year. Once he is in office and released from the unnatural pose of a candidate, President Gore's question would be whether the smartest guy in the room can also be the canniest. And having assumed the awesome responsibilities of the job, President Bush would have to show that he can be both everybody's friend and nobody's fool. Which is why, for voters, casting a ballot on Nov. 7 is both a choice of one imperfect man over another and a prayer for something better.

--With reporting by Eric Pooley/Nashville

With reporting by Eric Pooley/Nashville