NATION, Page 22Rude AwakeningFor all his experience and energy, the President is stumblingas 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
