<p>Is Clinton up to the job? As a staff shake-up begins and his
four-month approval ratings dip to record lows, Americans are
starting to wonder
</p>
<p>By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON--With reporting by Margaret Carlson, Dan Goodgame and Nancy Traver/Washington
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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?"
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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
Demoled 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<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."
</p>
<p> 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
