Baker Joining Bush’s Campaign at Time When Staff Rivalries Are Upsetting Drive

Telephones were ringing around Washington one night this week as reporters were alerted that Vice President George Bush was hastily arranging a trip to a defense plant in Annapolis, Md., to make a major announcement.

But there was one problem: the appearance was set for the same morning that reporters were to attend an important briefing by Bush campaign staff members on Republican National Convention plans. The result seemed to leave them to choose between the two.

The conflict was just another example of one arm of Bush’s team--his White House staff--not communicating with the other--his political staff two blocks away--on events that play a key role in Bush’s campaign for the presidency.

Enter Baker

Stepping into this somewhat frazzled scene is James A. Baker III, the cool-headed, Princeton-educated Texan who spent more than seven years as Ronald Reagan’s first White House chief of staff and as his second Treasury secretary. His job will be to smooth out the rough edges and harness Bush’s huge campaign machinery so that it propels the vice president to victory in November.

With Baker at his side, Bush on Friday told a crowd of campaign workers and reporters: “Jim Baker’s arrival will simply enhance this organization . . . on schedule, just at the right moment.”

Baker said he was “a realist about the difficulty of the task that faces us.” But he also said: “I don’t think that there’s anything fundamentally wrong and suggestions that there are, I think, are simply erroneous.”

Still, Baker’s task is a formidable one, though one for which he is well equipped. Bush is, according to various polls, 10 to 18 percentage points behind Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Helped Ford in ’76

But it was Baker, considered a brilliant organizer, who presided over the disparate ideologies and agendas in Reagan’s first-term White House. And it was Baker who, even before he directed Bush’s 1980 presidential bid, took the helm of Gerald R. Ford’s flagging 1976 campaign at midstream and helped bring Ford back to within a breath of victory over Jimmy Carter.

Also, perhaps as much as his record, Baker also gives the campaign a close Bush confidant at the top who can act for the candidate with unrivaled authority, GOP strategists say.

Baker’s political relationship with Bush began--and was cinched--in the 1970 Texas Senate race that Bush lost to the current Democratic vice presidential nominee, Lloyd Bentsen.

In that year, Bush asked Baker, a longtime Houston acquaintance, to lead his effort in Harris County, which includes metropolitan Houston. Baker was given a goal of 60% of the vote, according to Peter Roussell, the 1970 campaign’s press secretary. In the end, Bentsen won the Senate race, but Baker’s county voted 60.1% for Bush.

“You asked for it, you got it,” Baker remarked, according to Roussell.

On a much larger scale, Baker will now try to do it again.

Republican strategists had expected Dukakis to surge in the polls on the strength of his exposure at July’s Democratic National Convention, and have foreseen Bush rebounding when he moves to center stage at the Republican convention this month.

Seen as Magician

But as the poll results have worsened, Bush campaign workers have come increasingly to look to Baker as a sort of magician who can, himself, pull the campaign out of the fire. The announcement that Baker would join the campaign on Aug. 17, the day when Bush will be nominated at the convention and become eligible for $46.1 million in federal campaign funds, brought a stir at the campaign’s Washington headquarters.

“Everybody’s excited,” said Deborah Steelman, the campaign’s domestic policy adviser. “That, combined with the fact that we will get our money, are the two best things that could be happening to us. It shows we’re kicking into the fall campaign.”

Another campaign staff member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, referred to the five senior officials who have to date led Bush’s election effort, including campaign manager Lee Atwater, whose job will be eclipsed by Baker’s. “What’s needed is somebody who can run the whole thing, whose word is final. It will help get decisions made, rather than the perpetual debating that we’ve had,” the worker said.

Rivalries between two different factions--the campaign organization and the vice president’s White House staff--have reportedly increased in recent weeks as Bush’s slump continued.

This is a departure from months past, when most Bush aides marveled at the lack of internal distractions and staff friction.

‘Total Knowledge of Bush’

“What Baker adds is a total, detailed knowledge of George Bush and the total confidence of George Bush. Nobody has a relationship with the candidate like Baker has,” said Charles Black, a Republican political consultant.

Outside Washington, too, Republicans were looking forward to Baker’s arrival at the campaign.

Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, who will deliver the keynote address at the GOP convention, said Republicans were confident that the Bush campaign under Baker would begin closing the gap with Dukakis in public opinion polls.

“I can’t tell you how much rank and file Republicans are counting on Jim Baker to get the Bush campaign moving,” he said. “They think there’s something almost mystic about him.”

Staff writer Cathleen Decker contributed to this story.