Vignettes From Bush’s First Week: Win One, Lose One

Snapshot: Sitting down at the Cabinet Room table early in his first week as President, George Bush skims a set of 3- by 5-inch briefing cards. He drops them into his pocket and launches an hourlong conversation with congressional leaders about issues ranging from the deficit and the savings and loan crisis to relations with the Soviet Union.

The result: Fulsome praise from Democrats and Republicans alike. “He commented on everybody’s statement or question,” Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced) said with enthusiasm. “We had a dialogue. As you spoke to him, he made notes. He knows his stuff. That wasn’t true before.”

Snapshot: Faced with astronomical cost estimates for bailing out the nation’s insolvent savings and loan insurance fund, the fledgling Administration declares it is considering a fee of 25 cents to 30 cents per $100 on the checking and savings accounts of every American.

The result: Indignant howls from every corner of the land, with critics charging the scheme would penalize America’s savers and violate Bush’s pledge not to raise taxes. Instead of stepping quickly clear, Bush and Chief of Staff John H. Sununu become further entangled.

“This was clearly a story we didn’t need,” said one Administration official, asking not to be identified. He termed the plan a “glitch.” Said a rueful White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, it was “a lesson for everybody on how things can blow up and how fast they can.”

Taken together, the two vignettes illuminate the road ahead for the week-old Bush Administration.

As the session with congressional leaders suggests, Bush--like his mentor, Ronald Reagan--appears to be adroit in handling the mood-setting symbols and gestures that can ease the path of presidential leadership.

At the same time, the way the Administration seemed to step blindly into the savings and loan flap was a painful reminder that devising and advancing workable, politically palatable solutions to major problems is far more difficult.

Bush acknowledged as much Friday at his first presidential news conference. “I don’t expect it’s all going to be sweetness and harmony and light,” he said, his voice gravelly from a cold. “It’s been a good, easy week. I expect it will change dramatically in the days ahead.”

Rougher Times

And the likelihood of rougher times may be increased by the fact that the Administration is only now settling to the task of developing specific policy proposals and positions on the many problems awaiting action.

For now, however, the real confrontations are still in the future. Asked to sum up his week, Bush sounded still a little amazed at having finally achieved the office he sought for so long. “There’s still the wonder of it all,” he said. “It still feels different.”

Bush seemed to accentuate those differences this week as he set out to signal that it is his White House now and not Ronald Reagan’s. He did so by emphasizing a busy schedule, early morning work hours, a breezy style and the upbeat tenor of his meetings.

“The most important thing George Bush had to do was show he understood the office of the presidency and understood the system had to work again,” said Coelho, who serves as the Democrats’ third-ranking official in the House and who was one of Reagan’s sharpest critics.

“He and his wife, Barbara, have changed the face of the presidency back to regular people in charge, as opposed to the actor and actress as monarch. The symbolism of that has really gone over well.”

Perhaps the most symbolically telling moment came Thursday, when Bush addressed nearly 4,000 senior federal managers, exactly the sort of career bureaucrats against whom both Reagan and Jimmy Carter had campaigned.

“You are the first group that I am addressing as President outside the White House,” Bush said. “And you are one of the most important groups I will ever speak to.”

Where Reagan had declared during his first week in office that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Bush told his first-week audience that the “federal government (is) a powerful force for good.”

The point has not been to draw overt contrasts with Reagan, one senior White House official insisted, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There’s just been a focus on having George Bush be President.”

During Friday’s press conference, aides looked on, relaxed, smiling, as Bush easily fielded dozens of questions. During the Reagan years, press conferences were anxious times for staff members, who stood by worrying about possible presidential misstatements.

Then, there is the matter of schedule. It changes frequently--according to the President’s dictates, unlike the set-in-concrete, long-range schedule arranged for Reagan by his staff.

One day this week, Bush reached for the telephone and on the spur of the moment, set up the ultimate Texas power lunch: Democrat Lloyd Bentsen and Republican Phil Gramm, the state’s two senators; Cabinet nominees James A. Baker III of the State Department and Robert A. Mossbacher of Commerce and Cabinet secretary David Bates, a longtime Bush aide.

Over soup and sandwiches in the study off the Oval Office, the group discussed a host of major policy issues affecting both their home state and the nation. The session was casual, candid and relaxed, one of the lunch guests later told an aide.

Bush “has established a very collegial atmosphere, where you work with the President,” said Fitzwater. “He’s forcing little changes in the system, which are healthy. What the President has done is he’s told the White House staff to find ways to respond a lot faster than they are used to responding.”

Bush has been walking around the West Wing of the White House, visiting aides in their offices, rather than allowing himself to be trapped in his own quarters.

The little changes, aides say, will be followed by bigger ones--those that go to the heart of the problems Bush faces as he sets out to tackle the budget deficit and move ahead on the momentum he inherited in U.S.-Soviet relations.

Conspicuously absent from the first week were the bold policy proposals and dramatic gestures that new Presidents traditionally use to rack up early triumphs and give momentum to their presidencies. Instead, the emphasis, in Bush’s own words has been on “continuity, plus.”

That approach may squander a moment when public attention is focused on the President and opposition to him is low, some political consultants believe, but others argue that Bush has made the correct decision.

By “not trying to position himself around a 100-day agenda or a call to arms, he avoided a mountaintop of some kind that assures a fall into the valley at some point,” said Republican consultant Eddie Mahe.

But one pitfall of providing no riveting focus to the initial days could be seen at midweek when what Fitzwater optimistically called a “24-hour distraction”--the savings and loan tax plan--briefly dominated news coverage of the White House.

Now that Bush’s own aides have floated such proposals, the Administration will have a far harder time resisting creative “revenue enhancements” proposed in Congress, Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.) suggested.

But Bush seemed unperturbed. “It’s been a wonderfully harmonious week,” he said. The controversies “are just little ripples on the surface of an otherwise calm pond.”