TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/032089/03208900.054

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 10.0 KB | 196 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 22

Rude Awakening


For all his experience and energy, the President is stumbling as
his free-lance style leads to government by"ad-hocracy"

By Dan Goodgame


    Seldom has a President felt obliged after only seven weeks
in office to deny publicly that his Administration suffers from
"drift" and "malaise." But that is precisely what George Bush
did at a press conference last week, reciting a list of
accomplishments ranging from the savings and loans bailout to
proposals for curbing air pollution. "I think we're on track,"
the President insisted, adding somewhat wistfully, "A lot is
happening. Not all of it is good, but a lot is happening."

    The biggest happening, and the worst for Bush, was the
Senate's rejection of former Senator John Tower for Secretary
of Defense by a vote of 53 to 47. It marked the first time in
30 years that the full Senate had spurned a President's Cabinet
choice, and was a clear indication of which way the power is
flowing along Pennsylvania Avenue. Bush moved swiftly to stanch
the bleeding by replacing Tower with Congressman Richard Cheney,
a Wyoming Republican who served as White House chief of staff
under Gerald Ford. Cheney is expected to win quick FBI clearance
and Senate confirmation -- much to the relief of Bush, who
declared, "Too much time has been wasted here."

    All week the President was at pains to counter critics who
complain that too much time has already been wasted in this new
Administration. Despite Bush's extensive experience in
government and his campaign boast that he was "ready on day one
to be a great President," hundreds of key appointive posts
remain unfilled and crucial foreign policy decisions are on hold
pending completion of some 30 "reviews."

    In economic and domestic policy, the White House has been
energetic but surprisingly maladroit, hopping among major and
minor issues with little continuity or follow-through. The White
House has also been inattentive about managing the news and
delivering its message to the public, especially when compared
with skills of the Reagan Administration or even with the
"theme-of-the-day" Bush campaign. "The President has given
nobody the overall authority to coordinate people's efforts and
make sure things work around here," explains one senior
Administration official. "And there's only so much that even a
President as active as this one can keep track of. The rest is
falling through the cracks."

    The bright side of the Tower fiasco may be that it woke up
the White House. "It has got Bush's attention focused," says an
Administration official. An outside adviser says, "They've got
a major bailout operation under way right now." On Tuesday
night chief of staff John Sununu, ever confident and combative,
sought advice from an informal group of outsiders that he
occasionally convenes: a dozen former Bush campaign officials
and political consultants who gathered for dinner in the
Roosevelt Room and discussed how to recover from the debacle.

    One solace was that for all the Administration's early
failings and flailings, the President's popularity outside
Washington has remained strong: his approval rating has ranged
between 59% and 71% in recent polls. For the time being, the
President can coast on a strong swell of national contentment
and hope that interest rates don't climb too high. He also
continues to benefit from his obvious enjoyment of the
presidency, his self-deprecating humor, his grasp of the issues
raised at press conferences.

    Those who have worked closely with Bush say his best traits
-- his energy, enthusiasm and gregariousness -- can be his
worst enemies, sometimes leading him to strike out in all
directions at once. Bush is most effective, associates say, when
he has a strong and respected deputy to help him choose
priorities and stick with them. He allowed campaign manager
James Baker to play that role last fall, but in the White House
he has so far denied such authority to Sununu. Bush entered the
Oval Office determined to shed his image as an accident-prone
candidate who needed extensive handling during the presidential
race. He is equally determined not to look as sleepy or
staff-managed as Ronald Reagan. As a result, Bush brought along
no members of his superb campaign staff to the White House, "and
that was very conscious on his part," says a former campaign
official.

    Unlike Reagan's chiefs, Sununu does not control the
President's schedule, screen his phone calls or parcel out all
staff assignments. Instead, Bush deals directly and informally
with a wide range of aides, Cabinet secretaries and outside
visitors. A senior Administration official observes that Bush
operates as "his own chief of staff" in many ways, as well as
"his own best intelligence agent."

    During his eight years as Vice President, whenever Bush
wanted to know what was really going on in Congress or
California or Cairo, the former CIA director turned not only to
his staff but also to an extensive network of friends, former
aides and political allies, who would sometimes report back
through special phone and mail channels that skirted his
official staff. A former senior Bush staffer says he was
"flabbergasted" to learn that the boss "had his own cutouts,
just like a spymaster."

    As President, Bush still loves to free-lance. He jots
dozens of private notes, reluctant to rely on dictation. He
makes and takes scores of phone calls each day, talking to an
army of people in and out of government, from Congressmen to
civil rights leaders to cronies from the Texas oil fields. He
loves marginalia: recently he extensively edited a staff memo
on Soviet-American relations.

    One of Bush's senior aides and longtime tennis partners,
former Harvard government professor Roger Porter, has written
a book called Presidential Decision Making that could describe
Bush in action. Porter dubs the style "ad-hocracy," a management
pattern that "relies heavily on the President to distribute
assignments and select whom he listens to and when."

    Among the advantages of ad-hocracy, says Porter, is that
"it communicates the image of a President personally in
command." Among the disadvantages: it "frequently results in
jurisdictional battles," and since "ad-hocracy does not
differentiate between major and minor issues," the President's
agenda can easily get muddled. In an interview, Porter
emphasized that "most new Presidents engage in ad hoc decision
making." He sees Bush's curiosity and openness as strengths.
Another Administration official adds that the easy access the
President grants is "one of the reasons people love to work for
him."

    Still, ad hoc decisions can lead to posthaste confusion, as
quickly became apparent on Capitol Hill. When the Tower
nomination appeared to be doomed, White House counsel Boyden
Gray, a longtime Bush favorite who often acts independently of
others on the staff, pressed for postponement of a vote in the
Senate Armed Services Committee. But at the same time, White
House lobbyists were pressing for an early vote.

    The Administration's issue agenda too is pulled in many
directions at once. The peripatetic President delivers several
speeches a week, and sometimes several a day, on subjects as
diverse as drugs, volunteerism, government service, ethics,
education, child care and the minimum wage. On the morning
after his Feb. 9 budget address, he flew to Canada. Then he
exhausted his staff (though not himself) on a whirlwind five-day
tour to Japan, China and South Korea, including formal meetings
with two dozen foreign leaders that required extensive
preparation and diverted the Administration from the efforts to
confirm Tower and to fill other vacant posts.

    This scattershot approach makes it difficult to achieve the
cynically effective manipulation of TV coverage that was a
hallmark of the Reagan Administration. Sununu and White House
imagemeister Steve Studdert express disdain for the obsessive
attention to television and press coverage under Reagan. But a
former top Reagan official points out that "control of the
evening news and the headlines is one of the few tools
available" for a President who was elected without any specific
mandate, whose political opposition controls both houses of
Congress, and who has little federal money with which to buy
votes.

    Richard Neustadt, Harvard's eminent scholar on the
presidency, raises a more disturbing point about this -- or any
-- new Administration's public relations efforts. Neustadt, who
believes the early criticism of Bush is unfair, wonders "whether
the control of the electronic media that Ronald Reagan perfected
now requires that the President become more passive and turn
much of his schedule over to his media planners."

    When the Tower nomination foundered, an inordinate share of
the blame began falling on Sununu for his lack of Washington
experience and his abrasive personality. Many of the Tower
snafus, however, were beyond Sununu's control, as are most of
the tensions in the structure of the Bush White House. Several
Administration officials expect that this spring training crisis
could even strengthen Sununu's hand as Bush realizes he needs
someone to run stronger interference for him. Already Sununu has
adopted the system used by Bush's vice-presidential chief of
staff, in which subordinates are under strict orders to report
any assignment or information they receive from Bush. But now
that he is President, Bush's staff and contacts are so large,
and some of them so independent of Sununu, that the system often
fails.

    Bush and his aides seem to be realizing that the presidency
is too wide a stage to control by ad-hocracy. The trick will be
to impose coherence without stifling the President's
spontaneity. If the White House can do so, it should be able to
recover quickly from the Tower disaster. Otherwise, barely
halfway to his 100-day mark, America's 41st President may become
hostage to outside events and forces.