Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/092192/09219914.000

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                                                                                THE U.S. CAMPAIGN, Page 22

No Miracles Yet


The organization is tighter, the decisions come quicker, but
Baker is still struggling to inject a much needed jolt into
Bush's re-election campaign

By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON - With reporting by Dan Goodgame/
Washington


    Most Republicans breathed a sigh of relief when former
Secretary of State James Baker took over the White House in
August. Baker and his team, it was said, could make quick
decisions. They could stop the leaks. Baker could talk straight
to the stubborn President. As the engineer of Bush's 1988 win,
Baker seemed just the political wizard that the President's
often incoherent re-election campaign needed.

    With seven weeks left before the election, it is clear
that neither Baker nor his boss is working miracles -- yet.
Baker does deserve credit for making Bush focus on his biggest
weakness and the voters' overriding concern: the
Administration's handling of the economy. In an appearance
before the Economic Club of Detroit, Bush offered his clearest
prescriptions so far. True, the Baker plan provided little new
substance. But viewed as a campaign document rather than as a
bold new policy manifesto, Baker's speech at least re positioned
Bush as a man with a plan.

    The first task Baker and his aides faced when they arrived
at the White House was to impose order on a chaotic political
operation. Decision making had ceased. Top-level meetings took
hours and accomplished nothing. Second guessing and finger
pointing were rampant. Advance men were refusing to journey to
sites of future Bush events out of fear that they would be
canceled en route. Bush had little confidence in his top
advisers, and the strain was evident to anyone who watched him
on television. Baker has told friends that before returning to
the White House, he had discounted complaints about how
sclerotic the operation had become. Once he got there, he
confessed that he'd "had no idea how goddam bad it was."

    As luck would have it, Baker's arrival coincided with
Hurricane Andrew's. He initially won high marks for persuading
the ever cautious Bush to fly to both Florida and Louisiana
within hours of the storm. But at a time when Bush was trying
to pose as a giant in domestic affairs, he goofed by allowing
three days to pass before he took control of one of the worst
natural disasters in the nation's history. As one Baker aide put
it, "It was a tough first week."

    Baker quickly redistributed power in the hands of a core
group of advisers: longtime aide Margaret Tutwiler,
communications chief Robert Zoellick, domestic policy chief
Dennis Ross and political aide Janet Mullins. All four had
worked closely under Baker at the State Department and on the
1988 campaign; they trust one another implicitly and, as they
are quick to point out, often "finish one another's sentences."
Like Baker, they work 16-hour days, are in constant
communication and carry little pocket cards listing the things
to do before they go home that night.

    Each morning and night, Baker and his team meet with five
other officials: Budget Director Richard Darman, campaign
chairman Robert Teeter and manager Fred Malek, National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft and press secretary Marlin Fitzwater.
Baker makes most of the decisions on scheduling, speeches and
lines of attack; he demands same-day execution from his nine
aides. "Once decisions get made," says Malek, "they stay made."

    The most dramatic effect Baker has had so far is on the
mood and performance of the President. Just knowing that his
old friend is at his side, thinking through his every move, has
put some badly needed spring back into Bush's step. All of
Bush's speeches are now clearer, better written, more
substantive and, most important, consistent. "For the first time
in months," said a senior campaign official, "we are able to
stay on our message for more than 12 hours."

    Baker's team has already taken credit for toning down the
party's overheated family-values rhetoric following the
Republican Convention. After watching conservative speakers bash
gays and Hillary Clinton in Houston, the Bakerites immediately
sensed that the theme was, as an aide put it, "exclusionary,
rather than inclusionary." Within hours of taking over at the
White House, Baker team members requested poll data to back up
their hunch. When they got them, they moved to more closely tie
Bush's talk of family values to his policies. "There was just
a consensus," said an official, "that we were eventually going
to hurt ourselves if we weren't careful about how we handle it."

    Baker, who ordered the campaign to buy five minutes of
television time on four networks last week to recap the main
points of the Detroit speech, knows that the key to tough
campaigning is, as he once put it, "repetition, repetition and
repetition." Instead of 12 separate lines of attack on Clinton,
says Jim Pinkerton, a counselor to the campaign, "we've boiled
it down to `You can't afford Bill Clinton, and you can't trust
him.' "

    It was the attorney in Baker that told Teeter two weeks
ago to take another look -- "the way a trial lawyer would" --
at Clinton's contradictory descriptions of his draft record.
Baker felt that the real value of the draft issue was not so
much Clinton's behavior as a 23-year-old but his waffling and
incomplete accounts of his actions and motives, and the
questions they raised about his trustworthiness.

    In the past the Bush team had undercut its attacks on
Clinton's draft record by couching them in ridicule and bombast.
Under Baker's orders, Teeter asked campaign counsel Bobby
Burchfield to pull together the record in a clear, undramatic
fashion and let the public judge. Burchfield turned out a
lengthy, side-by-side comparison of Clinton's comments over the
past year that fueled numerous news reports. "Basically," says
Burchfield, "this is a situation where the histrionics could
very easily get in the way of the message we're trying to put
out, which is look at what the guy has said over the years.
We're not going to dress it up in any sort of politicized way.
We're just going to put it out there."

    The draft was not the only cudgel the Baker forces were
wielding against Clinton's integrity. Bush has begun to assert
with increasing intensity that Clinton's record on the Gulf War,
the North American Free Trade Agreement and even fuel economy
standards for new automobiles is riddled with inconsistencies.

    None of those are new lines of attack. But Baker has
rearranged them under a simple and potentially devastating
strategic framework: Whom do you trust? If Bush can reframe the
campaign about trust rather than change, his aides believe, he
will win. Conservatives in the Republican Party criticize the
approach as uninspired and unconventional but as a member of the
White House inner circle retorted, "we don't have time to
reinvent the wheel, and we're not trying to."

    That attitude was certainly evident in the Detroit speech.
Though Baker's plan consists of the same warmed-over ideas Bush
has been peddling for years, they are repackaged in a fashion
that turns every Bush position into a less-or-more proposition:
Do Americans want less government or more, less bureaucracy or
more, less taxation or more? Of course, the numbers don't add
up, and the choices are in most cases false. But to a
struggling Bush campaign, what matters is whether voters buy it.
As an Administration official put it bleakly, but candidly, "It
doesn't make much difference what's in the economic plan because
he's not going to follow through on it anyway."

    Baker is also relying on old-fashioned presidential pork
to buy votes. But several campaign officials note that it is
incongruous for the President to rail against a government that
"is too big and spends too much" while he is running around the
country doling out billions. Bush announced $8.6 billion in
hurricane aid to Florida and Louisiana and export subsidies to
farmers two weeks ago. When he cannot tap the U.S. Treasury, he
is prepared to tap the reserves of foreign governments. Last
week Bush made a special trip to St. Louis, home of McDonnell
Douglas, where he backed a $9 billion sale of 72 F-15 fighters
to Saudi Arabia.

    Will Baker's magic work? Many campaign insiders believe
his biggest challenge remains giving lasting substance to a
presidency that never stood for much in the first place. "Yes,
things are organized much better, and the work seems more
channeled," says a White House official. "But it's hard to point
to tangible progress on what we need, which is something to run
on, a banner to charge forward under, or a reason to vote for
George Bush."

    There is growing talk in Republican circles that Bush
should announce that Baker will stay on as chief of staff for
a year after re-election. On that proposal, both Bush and Baker
are mum. Bush resented having to ask Baker to bail him out one
more time, and Baker was not keen to return to a job he had for
four years under Ronald Reagan. "In the next two months," said
a longtime Baker watcher at the campaign, "we're going to find
out whether this is just another case for Jim Baker to win a
verdict on or whether it's a mission."