Momentum Isn’t Lost, Bush Aide Insists : Policies Pursued in ‘Reasoned, Methodical’ Way, Fitzwater Says

President Bush’s Administration is not drifting with lost momentum and squandered opportunities, spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said today, responding to a spate of public comments suggesting White House disarray.

“We simply don’t agree,” Fitzwater told reporters when asked about recent news accounts and remarks from various government quarters pointing to the slow pace in filling top posts, notably at the State and Defense departments.

“We believe that the (White House) staff is strong,” Fitzwater said, and that Administration policies are being pursued in a “reasoned, methodical fashion.”

Some “early successes,” he asserted, can be seen in a proposed rescue of the savings-and-loan industry, a fiscal 1990 budget plan “that arrived alive” on Capitol Hill and Bush’s recent diplomacy in Japan, China and South Korea.

“We’re very pleased with the progress . . . so far,” Fitzwater said.

At the same time, he acknowledged distractions such as the bruising Senate battle over John Tower’s nomination to be defense secretary, saying, “It’s been a difficult fight . . . (but) we still believe in the candidate.”

Bush is staying the course with the politically bloody Tower nomination, but he will try to draw some focus away from it through anti-drug speeches in New Jersey and Delaware on Tuesday and New York on Thursday, Fitzwater said.

The Tower controversy has left the Pentagon without long-term direction, and although daily work is being done, the Administration has missed some business and planning deadlines. Likewise at the State Department, where Secretary of State James A. Baker III has yet to complete his team, complaints are growing louder.

The Washington Post described the State Department in a front-page article today as “mired in a gloomy atmosphere of drift, sagging morale and lack of communication between the Foggy Bottom bureaucracy and Baker’s small palace guard of trusted political aides.”

In the newspaper’s Sunday commentary section, former Reagan White House Communications Director David Gergen warned that Bush’s early emphasis on vague “style over substance” has put him “perilously on the edge of a cliff . . . (with) a deepening sense in Washington that something is badly amiss.”

In Malibu, Calif., today former President Ronald Reagan said he has agreed with everything President Bush has said--so far.

“They are setting up their Administration so I am kind of waiting to hear his declaration on programs. There is still some reorganization, some journeys he’s making and he has not set a course,” Reagan told a crowd of 3,500 students and guests at Pepperdine University’s Firestone Field House.

“I haven’t heard him say anything I disagree with. . . . They haven’t got into the policy part yet.”