Administration Weakness Bared in Tower Fight

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s rejection of John Tower as defense secretary is a largely self-inflicted wound for President Bush that has chilled his honeymoon with Congress and laid bare the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of his fledgling Administration.

Even if Bush should ultimately overcome the lengthening odds against him and win approval for the nomination on the Senate floor, political veterans of both parties agree, he has suffered a loss of prestige and an eclipse of the aura of presidential power that will shadow him in other areas.

“For the President of the United States to lose a secretary of defense in his first months in office will haunt him for the rest of his term,” one longtime Republican adviser said. “A President cannot lose on big national issues this fast.”

Even before he took office, it was clear that Bush’s ability to lead would be circumscribed by the overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress--a factor built into the political landscape and now grown greater than it was for much of the eight years his predecessor occupied the Oval Office.

Nonetheless, some of his supporters say, unless Bush and his new team get their act together swiftly--charting a clearer course and steering more deftly, even rougher days lie ahead. The Administration must build its political foundations on more than appeals for bipartisanship and the genial demeanor of Bush himself.

“If your only agenda is bipartisanship, that makes things tough,” said one Administration insider, who also served in the Ronald Reagan Administration. “You need to have some strategy besides being nice to everyone to solidify support.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt “was not as nice a man as George Bush,” said Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Stephen Hess, but “this would not have happened to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“George Bush is a man of great loyalties and that is a characteristic that Americans respect and like very much in our neighbors,” Hess said. “But is that a presidential quality?”

The handling of the Tower affair, which White House officials concede was marked by inept maneuvering and poor planning, has underscored the slow and indecisive beginning the Administration has made in a number of pressing areas of national policy. It also was a tacit warning that any Administration can become a prisoner of events it does not move fast enough to control.

So far, Bush has offered at best a minimal agenda.

Running in Place

In foreign policy, for example, despite the President’s long experience in Washington and the vow by Secretary of State James A. Baker III “to hit the ground running, not just hit the ground,” the first month of Administration diplomacy has been marked by running in place.

With dozens of key policy posts still unfilled, Bush has yet to lay out any new foreign policy initiatives or even a detailed set of foreign policy goals. Instead, he has called for some 28 high-level reviews of U.S. objectives and strategies.

Officials say the reviews are expected to be completed by April, but events in some important areas are refusing to wait. “They’re clinging, for the moment, to the idea that you can calmly review the world and make foreign policy in a nice, controlled way,” said William Quandt, a former National Security Council official in the Jimmy Carter Administration. “But it’s a fantasy. . . . In the real world, policy tends to get made by events forcing your hand.”

Partly, the task of setting foreign policy goals has been slowed by the lack of a defense secretary. “You can’t review nuclear strategy without the Defense Department in the room,” a senior State Department official said.

“It makes it a lot more difficult to get going when you don’t have a defense secretary in place,” Baker acknowledged.

As a result of all these factors, the Bush Administration has looked more like a bystander than a central player in several areas of the world.

--In Europe, Baker won some high marks by visiting the capitals of America’s 15 NATO allies and helping to defuse a disagreement with West Germany over battlefield nuclear weapons--but he also discovered that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has retained the initiative in East-West affairs.

--In the Middle East, where Baker has insisted that it is premature for the United States to launch a negotiating initiative--despite appeals from both Arabs and Israelis--the Administration is faced with a high-profile reentry of the Soviet Union into the region’s diplomacy.

--In Central America, the Administration was taken largely by surprise when the area’s five presidents agreed to devise a calendar for disarming and dispersing the Contras, the Nicaraguan rebels who were the core of former President Reagan’s policy and whom Bush has steadfastly supported.

“We don’t know what our policy is supposed to be in Central America,” a U.S. diplomat said. “Nobody has told us yet.”

No Serious Blunders

So far, the absence of a foreign policy has produced no serious blunders; even in Central America, officials say, there is ample time for the Administration to recover. But the slow start is not encouraging, even to the Administration’s friends.

“They don’t have a serious problem yet, but they could soon--especially if the focus continues on personnel issues,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a senior State Department official in the Administration of President Gerald R. Ford. “At some point President Bush is going to have to give a couple of major speeches to lay out a clear sense of direction.”

Ironically, part of Bush’s dilemma is a fact the new President has pointed to with pride: that he won the White House in a “friendly takeover.” Unlike his two predecessors, Reagan and Carter, Bush did not sweep into office with a well-defined mandate for change--and a brace of exciting policy initiatives to match.

“They do have a problem in that they don’t want to cast themselves as a totally new Administration . . . they don’t want to be innovative and fresh,” Sonnenfeldt said. “It’s an awkward position.”

On the domestic front, the Bush Administration’s measured pace in developing a team and a set of policies has left it vulnerable to events.

--Rising inflation and higher interest rates pose an increasing threat to the foundations of Bush’s economic policy. The Administration’s response thus far has been limited to statements playing down the seriousness of the problem and urging restraint by the Federal Reserve Board--urgings the Fed has quietly brushed aside.

--Most economists say the bulk of the improvement in the troubling U.S. trade deficit is over, and any further narrowing in the trade imbalance will be much slower in coming from now on. That will complicate policy-making in many areas, but the Administration has offered little in the way of plans for jump-starting the American export drive.

--On the budget, the Democratic Congress is not likely to accept the President’s proposal to let him make modest increases in some popular programs while the Democrats help him share the flak from cutting other programs. The result is likely to be months of trench warfare, although in the end Bush may score points by sustaining his pledge of no new taxes this year.

--On Third World debt, the Administration initially signaled a more lenient attitude, but it subsequently has taken a harder-than-expected line in negotiations with major debtors, particularly Mexico and Argentina. That in turn has sparked some resentment among some senior Latin officials, who believe they have been treated too roughly by the Treasury.

Sharp Differences

It has led to sharp differences between the government’s two major players in managing the global debt problem--the Treasury, which acts on behalf of the Administration in negotiations with debtor governments, and the Federal Reserve Board, which itself has an important role in managing the debt problem and wants more flexibility.

Bush’s approach to the inflamed problem of illegal drugs also has been slow to take shape. His choice for drug czar, former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, is expected to be confirmed without difficulty, but he must choose and install key members of his staff.

And the Administration appears to be months away from spelling out a comprehensive attack on the problem, leaving a vacuum into which members of Congress are rushing with a host of proposals of their own.

The one bright spot so far is the Administration’s response to the crisis in the savings and loan industry. While critics challenge some of the details and Congress may insist on changes, most economists praise Bush for moving quickly with the right strategy: save the S&Ls; that are saveable and force the rest into the stronger hands of banks.

White House officials have defended their all-deliberate-speed approach to policy-making, arguing that the time they take now will pay off later with policies that are clearly thought out and have broad support.

Even its critics acknowledge that the Administration has not yet suffered any irretrievable losses.

And its defenders emphasize that Bush’s task is complicated by the fact that--on everything from the Tower nomination to strategic weapons policy--he must reckon with hostile majorities in both houses of Congress.

It is not just that the Democrats control the Senate, which was Republican when Reagan took over in 1981, and that their margin in the House is bigger than it was then. On top of that, political professionals believe, there are fewer conservatives on the Democratic side for Bush to appeal to.

“Congress and the President are separated both by institutional and ideological rivalries,” said David Keene, a GOP consultant and former campaign aide to both Bush and Reagan.

Yet these unavoidable problems have been aggravated by Bush’s approach to presidential leadership, critics say.

Without clear Administration strategies around which to rally public support, even Administration insiders concede, Democrats had little incentive to defy the leadership of their committee chairman, Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, whose opposition to Tower was the key in the party-line committee vote.

Reagan, for example, benefited from his imposing standing in the polls, GOP strategist Keene noted. “Reagan’s core positions were well known,” and that helped him build and hold public and congressional support and avoid setbacks such as those Bush has suffered, he said.

As a result of those setbacks, Bush’s carefully cherished spirit of bipartisanship now looks shopworn, although there is disagreement on the depth of the damage.

Senate Democratic leader George J. Mitchell of Maine sought to minimize it. “I hope this doesn’t result in any long-term damage between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, or between a Democratic Congress and a Republican Administration,” Mitchell told reporters.

Nunn rejected the idea that the committee vote was a partisan affair. “I’ve noticed that when I agree with the Republicans, I’m called a statesman. When I disagree, I’m called a partisan,” he said.

But Republicans were bitter after the vote. “At his (Bush’s) inauguration he offered his hand, and he doesn’t deserve to have it chopped off,” said Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas.

And Republican consultants, arguing that the Democrats had proven their lack of interest in bipartisanship, argued that Bush should now force the nomination to the floor and fight it out there, even if he loses.

“If he backs down now, it sends up the signal that he is not prepared to fight,” said GOP consultant Eddie Mahe. That, Mahe said, would embolden the Democrats to challenge him more frequently. Even if partisan confrontations lead to stalemate, Bush should proceed, Mahe said. “He can afford a stalemate just as easy as they can,” he said. “He’s got a bigger microphone.”

Staff writers William J. Eaton, Melissa Healy, Paul Houston, Stanley Meisler, Doyle McManus and Art Pine contributed to this story.