Yeutter Picked for Top GOP Post, Sources Say : Politics: Bush says agriculture secretary would be ‘superb’ party chairman but refuses to confirm the choice has been made.

Secretary of Agriculture Clayton K. Yeutter, an agribusiness economist with little political experience, has been offered the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee and is expected to accept the post, senior Bush Administration sources said Friday.

“All systems seem to be go, but it is not final,” a senior White House official said. “It’s been offered.”

Yeutter would succeed Lee Atwater, who is ill with a brain tumor.

While Yeutter’s move has not been made official yet, President Bush broadly suggested that it was coming when he told reporters Friday afternoon that Yeutter would be “superb” if he were to be named to the top party post.

Still, Bush refused to comment when he was asked whether Yeutter was to be selected. Yeutter, 60, also refused to discuss the matter with reporters Friday afternoon.

The selection would come in the wake of a series of political missteps in the Administration’s search for a replacement for the politically savvy Atwater.

William J. Bennett, who formerly held top Bush Administration posts as director of drug control policy and as education secretary, accepted the position and then backed out at the last minute in December after questions were raised by White House legal experts about his plans to seek substantial amounts of outside income by writing books.

Bennett, who has frequently spoken out on controversial issues during his tenure in the Ronald Reagan and Bush administrations, had been widely expected to use the party chairmanship as a platform from which to mount partisan attacks against the Democrats on hot issues such as racial quotas and affirmative action during the months leading up to the onset of the 1992 presidential campaign.

More recently, Rich Bond, a top Republican party operative who played a key role in Bush’s 1988 campaign, withdrew his name from consideration for the post. Bond, a former deputy party chairman who worked closely with Atwater during the Bush campaign, had reportedly complained that the new party chairman would be under the complete control of White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, who has been handling the selection process.

Unlike either Bond or Bennett, Yeutter has not left much of a mark on Republican politics, and his background could hardly be more different from the man he is expected to replace. Atwater is expected to stay on at the Republican National Committee with the title of general chairman, but the loss of someone with his political expertise at the helm of the party is widely considered to be a significant blow to Republican political prospects.

Yeutter, trained as a lawyer and an agricultural economist, has spent most of his career on agribusiness and trade matters. As the U.S. trade representative in the Reagan Administration from 1985 until 1989, he was an outspoken advocate of free market economics, a position he has continued to maintain as agriculture secretary, pushing for a global reduction in agricultural trade barriers.

Yeutter operated a 2,500-acre farm in Nebraska for nearly 20 years, was an agricultural economics professor at the University of Nebraska and in the 1970s served as president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where agricultural commodities are traded.

Although Yeutter was involved in Nebraska politics and is known in Republican circles as a good fund-raiser, his apparent appointment left some party operatives, especially conservatives, unimpressed.

“It shows how far down in the Rolodex they had to go,” said Paul M. Weyrich, national chairman of the Free Congress Political Action Committee and a prominent Republican conservative.

Staff writer Jim Gerstenzang contributed to this story.