The Pit Bull Who’s Giving White House a Bad Name : Administration: The chief of staff is again displaying remarkable arrogance toward Congress. Did he learn nothing in the budget battles?

The war is over. Spring is here. And with it returns the domestic agenda and a renewed prominence for the short, plump figure of the most powerful and feared White House chief of staff since Richard M. Nixon’s Prussian guard of H.R. Haldeman.

The first unmistakeable sign that John H. Sununu has opened a new political season came in the exquisite care with which the military bases scheduled for closure were picked to cause maximum embarrassment for Democratic congressmen. The very men who, for years, have taken credit for bringing the Pentagon’s tax dollars home to the voters.

Then came the phone calls from Sununu to the chief executives of many of the 200 corporations that make up the Business Roundtable. The White House, he said, strongly advised them to back out of negotiations with civil-rights groups aimed at hammering out a compromise bill to end racial discrimination in the workplace. Sununu does not want to let the Democrats off the hook on a civil-rights package that Republicans have dubbed “the quota bill.”

While the world watched the war, Sununu has been focusing on the next election, chairing a fortnightly meeting of the “Wednesday group” of Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher, pollster Robert S. Teeter, Republican National Committee chairman Clayton K. Yeutter and Budget Director Robert G. Darman. They have already selected the reelection agenda: triumph abroad and, at home, the four issues of education, crime, energy and transportation.

Forget those angry Democratic vows to have Sununu’s scalp after last fall’s bruising budget battles. The White House chief of staff is working as if he had a lock on the job.

Sununu has a constituency of one to please--George Bush. And with a new budget battle and controversial crime and civil-rights bills looming in Congress this year, Sununu will take charge of the infighting while the President nurtures his poll ratings and stays above the fray. If this is anything like last year’s trench warfare, we are in for a grueling political session.

Democrats in Congress who battled Sununu over last year’s budget deal dubbed him “the No-Neck-Monster,” and worse. Rep. Patricia Schroeder of (D-Colo.) caught the tone with elegant venom when she insisted “the economy is in deep Sununu.”

At one heated moment in the intensive budget negotiations, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) rose to his feet and declaimed: “I have had 30 years in the U.S. Senate, and I have participated in many such summits, and I have never in my life observed such outrageous conduct as that displayed by the representatives of the President. Your conduct is arrogant. It is rude. It is intolerant.”

There is blood on the White House carpets already. Sununu is credited with the scalp of Education Secretary Lauro F. Cavazos. And there is blood on Sununu’s office walls. Sununu’s aide, Edward M. Rogers Jr., who sharpened his teeth as Lee Atwater’s sidekick on the presidential campaign, has gone--apparently the scapegoat for Sununu’s bad blood with Congress.

Never a Washington insider, and accustomed to the part-timers of the New Hampshire legislature, Sununu has yet to show much understanding, far less respect, of the Democratic majority in Congress--who control Bush’s legislative agenda. Sununu cultivates the image of an intellectual bully who likes to say, “no.” He carefully declines to refute the famous anecdote in which he threatened to chain-saw the gonads off U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Richard L. Lesher.

The pit bull of the Bush Administration, Sununu is a deceptively owlish butterball who munches pocketfuls of M&M; chocolate peanuts and collects baseball cards. A scientist with a photographic memory and a Ph.D from MIT, he uses his 180 IQ and his hobby of “recreational mathematics” to browbeat opponents into submission.

The chief of staff programmed a model of the global weather system into his White House computer to confirm his skepticism about acid rain and the threat of global warming--and justify his opposition to costly measures to reduce pollution. That is a rear-guard action Sununu seems to be losing, partly because the bulk of the scientific community and other world leaders tell Bush that Sununu is wrong, and partly because William K. Reilly, the seriously worried chief of the Environmental Protection Agency is persuasive--and an old Bush family friend.

In the White House and among Republican colleagues, Sununu is addressed as “Governor”--after his remarkable stewardship of the state of New Hampshire, turning a $44-million budget deficit into a $32-million surplus in six years. More to the point, as governor of a key primary state, he delivered New Hampshire to Bush in 1988, when the campaign was faltering after losing to Sen. Robert Dole in Iowa. Sununu even arranged to hold his daughter’s wedding deep in the New Hampshire heartland, reckoning it would help carry some key counties.

But Sununu’s Bush connection goes back to 1982. His campaign to be governor of New Hampshire was running into money trouble. He appealed to Vice President Bush, and Bush flew north for a barnstorming fund-raiser that brought $250,000 to the Sununu campaign--and began a close political alliance.

This relationship survived one important hurdle for Sununu--the Jewish community’s suspicion of the most prominent Arab-American in U.S. politics. Born in Havana on July 2, 1939, to a Lebanese father, Sununu has soft-pedalled his Arab connection--save for one powerful and carefully phrased speech to the National Assn. of Arab-Americans in 1984, when he told the community they had an obligation to work for “a foreign policy that is evenhanded.” If Arab-Americans “want to get a result--you want to achieve the election of somebody who believes in issues as you do,” he said, and went on to advise his community to “mimic the success formula of those who have opposed” the Arab cause.

When his appointment as Bush’s chief of staff was first rumored, Jewish leaders expressed concern, citing Sununu’s refusal to join other governors in denouncing the “Zionism is racism” vote at the United Nations. Sununu insisted he supports “the integrity and protection of Israel.”

He has powerful friends. Barbara Bush adores him. Vice President Dan Quayle skis with him. Mikhail S. Gorbachev is grateful to him for going to Moscow last August to give Kremlin aides a brisk course in setting up a Soviet version of a White House administrative machine.

The patrician “kinder and gentler” image that Bush has cultivated since his inauguration has always needed a tough guy to do the President’s bidding and take no prisoners. Atwater played that role during the presidential campaign, and then as Republican National Committee chairman--until stricken by the brain tumor that killed him. Now the role has been assumed by Sununu, who defended his combative stance in last year’s budget battle with, “Everyone understood you have to break a little china.”

“He reminds me of a successful military officer,” says Sen. John S. McCain (R-Ariz.). “The commanding officer is the good guy and the exec is the disciplinarian. It’s almost a perfect match.”

The problem with the military analogy is that soldiers fight an enemy. No matter how strict your interpretation of the doctrine of separation of powers, that is not quite the relationship between White House and Congress that the Founding Fathers had in mind. With the deficit ballooning toward $300 billion, a new trade war looming with Japan and the Soviet Union turning sour, Bush may yet have to ask himself if better relations with Congress require a sacrifice.