To judge a president by a transition is like judging dinner by the noise out in the kitchen; the clatter is fascinating, but it doesn’t guarantee what’s about to appear on the table. Still, along a choppy passage from Election Day to the Inauguration, the new president has dropped the first clues to his own constitution. How quick are his reflexes, how short his temper, how long his attention span? What balance will he strike between words and deeds, nerve and caution? Fragments of evidence now suggest a gap between Clinton the Public-that sunny policy wonk-and Clinton the Private-outwardly just folks, inwardly a control freak. In all probability, the frictions of the past two months won’t leave much of a mark. Still, the process presents an intriguing question. Does the transition foreshadow a new Age of Bill, or a future that might better be called The Big Schmooze?
To crib from Thomas Hobbes, presidential transitions tend to be nasty, brutish and short. And for a man who hates to say no, Clinton’s transformation from campaign to governance has seemed especially awkward. His missteps have diminished the glow of the run-up to the Inauguration. Some operatives who stood with him during last winter’s dark days in New Hampshire have become casualties. So have political allies who thought their heavy lifting had won them a place at the table. Some hurt themselves, some fell victim to long-simmering vendettas, others ended up as offerings on the altar of “diversity,” the transition watchword. James Carville, the pure political warrior with no interest in a government job, put it best when he said “In a campaign you [stick it to] your enemies; in a transition you [stick it to] your friends.” A few studies in frustration:
If Clinton’s transition maneuvers suggest anything, it is that he’ll be a relentlessly hands-on executive. Having studied the errors of Jimmy Carter, Clinton obviously hoped not to repeat them: Carter let cabinet officers pick their own staffs; Clinton elected to sign off on subcabinet jobs himself. His hope was to build a culture of loyal “new Democrats” who would not subvert him with leaks and other exercises in bureaucratic disloyalty.
His principal winnowing technique was the Little Rock audition. A van with tinted glass smuggled prospective topsiders in secret from the airport to the governor’s mansion. The first test was to see how well they could button their lips (“I’m not even going to tell you the airline I flew on,” one contender told a snoop). Another tryout got a friendly warning from Christopher: “Don’t lobby. That’s not smart. The Clintons don’t like it.” Over soup and sandwiches, the president-elect would sit talking policy, talent, calories. Of the best and the brightest to arrive, the most relaxed scored well; the aggressive and the aloof left him cold.
The machinery was slow; insiders concede that it will take four months to fill 250 subcabinet jobs and perhaps a year to match names to the rest of 4,000 appointments. “My impression is that every transition aide pretends to know what’s going on,” said one bruised contender. “But only one or two people really know-Bill Clinton and Hillary.” The presidential campaign left trust-no-one scar tissue on both of them; desensitized, they weren’t averse to disappointing their friends. Despite Clinton’s public disavowal of lobbyists, one potential cabinet officer and a number of other wanna-bes found themselves grilled at the offices of such rainmaker law firms as Covington & Burling or Patton, Boggs & Blow. The vetting squads scanned income-tax returns and Federal Election Commission reports looking for pitfalls. In separate rooms, wives were asked whether their husbands had affairs.
Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado, who helped Clinton win the West, got a call from grateful Clintonites several days after the election asking what job he wanted. Wirth, a leading critic of nuclear cleanup policies, said he’d like to be secretary of the interior, but was later persuaded to head Energy and was urged to start putting together a staff, according to transition sources.
Then Arizona Sen. John McCain and Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, lashed on by the nuclear cleanup lobby and the coal industry, targeted Wirth. Privately, Gramm let it be known that he intended to lead a vehement attack on Wirth. For weeks Clinton let Wirth dangle in the wind. Al Gore, both a friend and an old competitor in environmental policy, didn’t save him. Clinton stalled until arguments for diversity ironically rescued him. He asked aides to look for blacks in the energy business. They found Hazel O’Leary, a Carter retread and Minnesota utility executive. Others may have been more qualified. O’Leary got the job. Clinton and Gore are reportedly creating a senior position for Wirth at State.
The pursuit of diversity shaped the fates of several major contenders. “Diversity was always on the table,” recalls one of the brain trusters who sat in on the East Conference Room sessions. Over and over Clinton told them, “I want more names.” Faxes and computers on the 12th floor of his Washington transition headquarters processed 20,000 resumes. “Diversity is an admirable goal,” says one harried member of a staff putting in 17-hour days. “But you wouldn’t believe what chaos it is causing.” The strategy was to identify top posts that were sure to go to white men, then to delay announcing those appointments until enough women and minorities could be found for other jobs. “Don’t send us any more white males,” was the word that soon went out to Democratic brokers in Congress and among the interest groups.
One near casualty was Bruce Babbitt, the former governor of Arizona. As an environmentalist, he was well qualified to head the Interior Department; but he also spoke fluent Spanish and was interested in becoming trade representative. Hispanic lobbyists persuaded Clinton that the new president could not afford to do less than Bush, who had two Hispanics in his cabinet. Hispanic Congressman Bill Richardson of New Mexico offered himself for Interior. Word leaked that he would win the appointment.
Re-enter Tim Wirth. He phoned Clinton, telling him that Richardson was not widely respected on Capitol Hill and that environmentalists and Hill heavies alike would hoot at his nomination. This time he won. Richardson joined Wirth on the sidelines. Babbitt eventually got Interior. But until the night before the appointment, he still thought Clinton meant to name him trade representative.
As the Christmas deadline for completing the cabinet drew near, pressure grew on Clinton to name a woman as attorney general. He first settled on Pat Wald, a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, commonly considered the second most powerful court in the land. She declined overtures because she wants to spend more time with her grandchildren. Shirley Hufstedler, a former federal judge and secretary of education to Jimmy Carter, was the next choice. She told Christopher, “I’m too old to be flying around the country and so are you.” Clinton then settled on Brooksley Born, a partner at Arnold & Porter, the Washington superfirm. National Public Radio reported that she would be picked.
Wrong again. She was associated with feminist groups who angered Clinton enough to launch his attack on “bean counters” and “quotas.” She had no experience in criminal law, which led career Justice lawyers and FBI agents to oppose her-and they passed word of their displeasure to the transition team. Worst of all, she had a rough Little Rock audition. Clinton found her distant and aloof.
That left Zoe Baird, counsel to Aetna Life and Casualty Co., a protegee of Christopher for whose firm she had worked in the 1980s. Susan Thomases, a tough-minded lawyer who is Hillary Clinton’s closest confidante, had touted Baird as Clinton’s White House counsel. In fact, Clinton was prepared to appoint Baird White House counsel until he soured on Born for A.G. But before Baird could meet Clinton about the attorney-general job, Thomases put herself in the running. Although she had been a close friend of the Clintons for 20 years, Thomases sat for a formal interview. “She has all the subtlety of a bulldozer without a clutch,” said one transition aide. So Clinton turned to Baird. He was “bowled over” by Baird in their first meeting, sources say, and sold on her appointment even though she had told transition aides that she had hired an illegal-alien couple to help with her household chores in Connecticut.
Clinton’s approach to staffing the White House generated another uproar. Looking for a chief of staff with a low-maintenance ego who would not build a separate power base, he chose McLarty. McLarty looked like no match for figures of the caliber of Dick Cheney, who served Gerald Ford, or James Baker, who worked for Ronald Reagan. Skirmishes broke out. Would naming George Stephanopoulos deputy chief of staff be seen as taking too big a bite out of McLarty? What could he do about Paul Begala, who turned down a low-level assistant’s job to Stephanopoulos? In the end, Begala received a lucrative consultancy at the Democratic National Committee.
Like a baby boomer who hates to foreclose any opportunity, Clinton didn’t like flat no’s; he juggled his assets, looked for deals. And he was good at it. His 12 years as a governor had given him a strong grasp of economics and domestic policy. Still, up against true heavyweights, he could be rolled. Given the state of the economy, one of his most vital appointments was secretary of the Treasury. He could pick from any number of shrewd and unconventional players. As it turned out, the choice wasn’t entirely his, since Lloyd Bentsen, rich in years, wealth and honors, desperately wanted to crown his own public service with that particular job.
Cheerfully ignoring Clinton’s disdain for pushy job applicants, Bentsen’s high-voltage friends, including Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, lobbied hard for him. On reflection, Clinton considered that he was in the market for someone hefty to shepherd his economic program through Congress. As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Bentsen did have a million friends. Word of Bentsen’s interest leaked into the papers. After his camp indignantly denied everything, Bentsen grabbed the job.
Bentsen was hardly the embodiment of dramatic change that Clinton promised in the campaign. The president-elect subsequently hired plenty of diversifiers: African-Americans like Mike Espy at Agriculture, Hispanics like Henry Cisneros at Housing and Urban Development, and Federico Pena at Transportation. But the real message was in the overall mix. Activists like Robert Reich; Shalala, former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, or Henry Cisneros, once mayor of San Antonio, could fill the vacuum of the Reagan-Bush years with plenty of fresh sound and fury. But the ultimate power-where the money would come from, how much of it there would be and who would get it-that particular matter Clinton assigned to the fiscal conservatives, moderate and pragmatists of his economic team.
The appointments also offered no true measure of Clinton’s larger economic game plan. If he is to restore cash income growth to working Americans and faster growth to the economy, h must slow soaring health-care and regulatory costs. That, of course, would also bankrupt his presidency. Having promised to extend health-care coverage while cutting the deficit in half by 1996, he had to find a way to backpedal.
How Clinton did it demonstrated powers of invention that MIT economist Paul Krugman, a disaffected supporter, now calls “the Claude Rains Scenario,” from a scene between Rains and Humphrey Bogart in the movie “Casablanca.” Just as Rains, the worldly police inspector, says he is “shocked, shocked” to discover gambling in Rick’s bar, Clinton now says he is shocked to discover the deficit will be at least $100 billion worse than he was told. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office made a similar prediction last August. A deficit disaster must have been part of the bad news Clinton received during a stop at Blair House in Washington shortly after the election. At the time his reaction startled his team. “I know you guys are really upset about it, but I’m really excited,” he said. “This just raises the threshold of the challenge.” The “discovery” provided cover for him to retreat on his earlier deficit-cutting promise: his target for halving the deficit became six to eight years rather than four.
Candidate Clinton had promised to “focus like a laser beam” on the economy; but troublemaking opportunists like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic may be tempted to test a young commander in chief who is green in foreign affairs and military matters. Clinton took care to prepare himself. With Somalia, Haiti and Russia also percolating, Samuel (Sandy) Berger, head of the foreign-policy transition, set up agency teams to regalvanize State, Defense, the CIA and the National Security Council. He’s also enlisted independent analysts to provide fresh thinking and specific options on all likely hot spots. “Sandy was determined that nobody was going to say or write that Bill Clinton faced his first foreign-policy crisis and was paralyzed,” said one transition agent.
While the Clinton warm-up was reassuring, some early missteps showed his inexperience. George Bush helped him by sending troops to Somalia, dropping bombs on Saddam Hussein and pressing the United Nations for a political solution in Haiti. There the trick was to keep 100,000 boat people, encouraged by Clinton’s criticism of the Bush policy of sending them home, from landing on Florida during the new president’s first week in office. “We got into that box, and they’ve tried to help us find a way out,” one Clinton strategist conceded. Clinton also learned the dangers of speaking in speculative, “what if” terms. Last week he allowed himself to be drawn into a rambling, discursive conversation on Iraq with The New York Times in which he appeared to offer Saddam an olive branch. The next day he had to explain himself.
It could take some time to see how Clinton’s foreign-policy team will shake out. With Bill and Hillary Clinton insisting on vetting so many subcabinet appointments, their hands-on treatment might ironically create “their own bottleneck,” says one transition operative. The question now is whether aggressive appointees like Secretary of State Warren Christopher, national-security adviser Anthony Lake and Secretary of Defense Les by recruiting as many of their Aspin will try to fill the vacuum by recruiting as many of their own people as they can and presenting the Clintons with a fait accompli-as seemed to be the case in Christopher’s choosing Peter Tarnoff, an old Carter State Department hand, as an under secretary of state.
Throughout the transition, Hillary Clinton kept largely out of sight (“It’s easier to get a photograph of the pope in the shower than a picture of her,” grumped one frustrated shooter). Behind the scenes she was omnipresent. Transition aides knew she might walk in on their deliberations at any time. She was careful not to leave any visible fingerprints on Clinton’s more important decisions. But asked to discuss her influence, some of the new president’s aides handle the question gingerly. One of the bolder advisers said, “I’m not a fan of Hillary’s warmth. She could go a long way to being nicer to staff " Then the aide added quickly, “She has extra-good judgment and she’s really smart.”
If flip-flops, staff delays and a minor scandal or two frayed the transition, that was hardly the end of the world. To a degree, the last-minute heat reflected the cabin fever of reporters chafing at the confines of Little Rock. No transition runs flawlessly, and so far Clinton has not run into problems of the Bert Lance or John Tower magnitude that depressed the White House entrance of Jimmy Carter and George Bush. “He doesn’t seem to feel the weight of the burden he asked for,” observed one of his people. He let it be known that there would be no 100-Day Plan. Instead he was reckoning on a six-month program of reconciling his promises with Washington realities. So welcome to The First 200 Days. As they always say on Inauguration Day, Let us begin.
Do you approve of the way Bill Clinton has handled his presidential transition?
68% Approve 18%Disapprove
For this NEWSWEEK Poll, The Gallup Organization interviewed a national sample of 753 adults Jan. 14-15. Margin of error + / - 4 percentage points. “Don’t know” and other responses not shown. The NEWSWEEK Poll copyright 1993 by NEWSEEK, Inc.
