Making Do In a Pinch

By Michael Duffy/Washington

Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers plunked herself down in David Gergen's basement office in the West Wing last Monday night and laid out her problem. Just hours before, Clinton had named Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, but then abruptly ended a press conference when Brit Hume of ABC News nettled the President with a question about his tortured selection process. Myers told Gergen that she expected the morning to bring good economic news, and was looking for a way to capitalize on that story and make the Rose Garden incident history. Gergen, who served as communications director for Ronald Reagan, said, "Let's just walk him into the briefing room tomorrow morning."

Clinton was cool to Gergen's idea at first but relented after some prodding. He appeared before reporters the next day at noon, and made a cathartic joke at his own expense. "You know what I'm upset about?" he asked the newly married Hume. "You got a honeymoon, and I didn't." As reporters chuckled, Gergen whispered to Myers, "That was perfect." Clinton left the briefing room feeling triumphant. "That was fun," he said to Myers. "We ought to do < more of it, you know?"

By the end of his first good week in months, Bill Clinton had begun to shed, often grudgingly, some of the peculiar habits that helped send his approval ratings to a record low for a first-term President. He is delegating responsibility to a new troika of top aides. He is more disciplined with his words in public. He is spending less time in meetings with advisers and more time mending fences with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. While no one believes the White House is working perfectly yet -- the President remains hopelessly behind his daily schedule -- Clinton's confidence is returning. "The President," said White House chief of staff Mack McLarty, "is in a more natural gait."

Clinton's progress coincided with several successes on Capitol Hill last week that suggest that this White House may not spend all four years in intensive care. Most were months in the making, and none were unalloyed Clinton wins. But their combined effect broke the gloom that had pervaded the White House and fractured some of the gridlock in Washington. After weeks of intraparty wrangling, Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee agreed to a deficit-reduction measure that included a gasoline tax increase of 4.3 cents per gal. and a $68 billion cut in Medicare benefits over five years. While a vote in the full Senate and an ugly conference to reconcile differences with the House version still loom, the latest deal takes Clinton closer to making good on his promise to cut the deficit by $500 billion during the next five years.

The breakthrough came a week after Clinton pulled out of the Finance Committee's negotiations in order to let chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan and majority leader George Mitchell forge the compromise. McLarty said Clinton will stay "a little above" the parliamentary fray at least until the measure clears the Senate and goes to conference committee. "The point," said an adviser, "is to get something on the table so that when the economy gets better, you can take credit for it."

In another move that helped reposition Clinton as a moderate, the Senate adopted a campaign-finance reform bill on Wednesday that imposes voluntary spending limits. The same day two separate committees approved scaled-back versions of Clinton's national-service program, which would give about 25,000 volunteers a $7,000 stipend and $5,000 to pay off college loans for each year of social, law-enforcement or environmental work. Even the White House was surprised when 107 House Republicans were among the majority last week that approved a $2.5 billion Russian-aid package, something that Clinton has vigorously pushed. The President's aides arrived at their desks Thursday morning to find what one called "the first good front page of the year."

Meanwhile the White House reorganization that Clinton launched three weeks ago is beginning to pay off. Clinton is now relying on a team of three aides -- Gergen, McLarty and senior adviser George Stephanopoulos -- to make many decisions, coordinate policy and foil errors before they turn into embarrassing debacles. The trio has taken control of many matters that Clinton once insisted on administering himself, and is working surprisingly well together. "We have more hands on deck," Stephanopoulos said on Friday. "We can ask more questions. We can look over the horizon. We are beginning to work on problems before they get to the President" or, he admitted, the front page. Added Gergen: "The three of us are bonding very well. We finish each other's sentences."

Though McLarty is still the staff ceo, Gergen has become the chief operating officer. Many Clinton aides who were skeptical on his arrival just weeks ago now praise Gergen's judgment, his sense of timing, and are openly grateful for what one called his "seasoning and experience." When Myers too candidly described a meeting between Clinton and Alan Greenspan two weeks ago, prompting doubt about the Federal Reserve chairman's independence, aides were astonished at how quickly the episode was smoothed over. Greenspan simply telephoned Gergen, his old Nixon-era colleague, to work out "clarifying" language. During an hour-long prep session for Clinton's prime-time press conference Thursday, it was Gergen who cleared the Oval Office of innumerable junior aides so Clinton could concentrate for the final 15 minutes. "Gergen," said an official, "is in control. He is in control."

Not all is sweetness and light, however. Aides grumble that Gergen overplayed his role when he followed Clinton into the briefing room last week and stood nearby looking just a bit too much as if he were watching a presidential marionette. Many of the communications operatives who were once all powerful under Stephanopoulos resent any credit Gergen gets. "Anything that goes right will be ascribed to Gergen," said one, "and anything that goes wrong will get blamed on us." But such carping is widely dismissed. "George's acolytes now have to work through channels," said an aide of the Stephanopoulos crew, "and that's good for the President."

Gergen hedges his certitude: "So far it's been good," he told TIME. "We feel better. But we got a lot of work to do, and nobody's saying 'We're out of the woods.' "

Gergen's toughest job will be to help Clinton cast as victories what are the necessary losses of political compromise. The Finance Committee's action last week put to rest any chance that Clinton would realize his goal of heavily taxing energy consumption to pay for new investments in education, plant and equipment. As Clinton imagined it, the new spending was supposed to stimulate the economy. "What's happened instead," said a senior official, "is that the stimulative effect will come almost entirely from lower interest rates that stem from deficit reduction, rather than from any impact of the budget items themselves."

Clinton's task remains enormous. He must stay focused on the deficit, end his micromanaging, and come up with something to say about the budget besides how badly he "wants to keep the process moving." His closest advisers admit privately that, even with the new troika in place, the White House still needs a bad cop to impose more discipline on independent-minded party regulars and also on the President. But Clinton is learning. And school is one area in which he knows how to excel.

With reporting by Nancy Traver and Adam Zagorin/Washington