NEWS ANALYSIS : Newest Miscues Hint at Disarray in White House

President Bush’s forced about-face on affirmative action policy Thursday was the latest in a series of blunders and missteps that have alarmed Republicans and given Democrats reason to hope that the White House may no longer possess the political savvy that once made it seem invincible.

The wreckage along a two-week trail of miscalculation--stretching from Bush’s hastily conceived suggestion for rolling back credit card interest rates through this week’s furtive effort to undo decades of federal support for affirmative action--has created the impression of a panicky White House that may prove unable to navigate what had seemed a sure road to reelection.

“It’s a total disaster,” one White House official said Thursday. And implicitly at least, the official put the blame on the Oval Office itself, saying: “There’s just no clear guidance from the top.”

What accounts for this turn of affairs--a succession of miscues all the more astounding compared with the near-flawless management of foreign affairs?

The answer, anxious Republicans say, lies in the fact that Bush himself has often given domestic affairs no more than a lick and a promise and has signed off on an arrangement that allows White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu wide latitude to operate on his own.

Bush has also permitted White House counsel C. Boyden Gray to establish a relentlessly hard line on affirmative action--an issue some strategists say could help the President retain support among white voters but others fear could open the GOP to charges of playing racial politics, especially after the David Duke episode in Louisiana.

The politically shrewd team that carried Bush to the White House--headed by the likes of now-Secretary of State James A. Baker III and the late Lee Atwater--is no more. In its place, Sununu has assembled a cadre of conservatives who seem to have little instinct for the larger stage a successful presidential candidate must occupy.

And inside the White House, sources say, Sununu and budget director Richard G. Darman have demanded subservience, stifled debate and cut off those who might question their proposals--a concentration of power to which Bush has never objected.

As long as national attention was focused on foreign affairs, critics say, these shortcomings were not a major problem. But now the stubborn economic downturn has brought the nation’s attention sharply back to domestic problems.

“President Bush is successful in foreign policy. He has a good team,” House Republican Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia told reporters Thursday. But, he added pointedly: “He needs a domestic policy team along the same lines.”

The problem burst into view earlier this month, on Election Day, when the White House--like much of the rest of Washington--awoke to discover that voter anxiety over the economy and such prosaic issues as health care had sent Bush’s former attorney general, Dick Thornburgh, down to defeat in the Pennsylvania Senate race. The President abruptly canceled a planned trip to Asia--a move some political strategists say conveyed an image of panic.

Soon afterward, at Sununu’s urging, Bush suggested cutting credit card rates--apparently failing to anticipate that his business constituents would react with alarm or that congressional Democrats would put him in a box by moving to enact his idea into law.

And the 11th-hour attempt to scuttle federal affirmative action rules--the political equivalent of a thumb in the eye to civil rights groups and the Republicans who support compromise on the sensitive issue--again presented the appearance of a President and a White House careening from ditch to ditch with little sense of their own political best interests.

With the first primaries only months away and Democrats gaining strength in public opinion polls, the sudden losing streak has also left other prominent Republicans anxious for change. Some hope Bush will shake things up as he creates his campaign team, giving longtime loyalists a greater voice.

But Sununu has shown a fierce reluctance to cede his control, and as the tension level rose Thursday, he gave public display of his instinct to lash back when under fire.

Apparently angry about a Washington Post article critical of his role in the credit card debacle, Sununu confronted the paper’s White House correspondent after a ceremony on the South Lawn. “Everything you write is a lie,” Sununu snapped, according to two sources, in what a senior White House official called an “inexcusable” display of temper.

To be sure, many White House officials and other Republican politicians insist that Bush’s own instincts for political survival mean his present troubles will be no more than passing.

But other prominent Republicans complain that Bush has been too accepting of Sununu’s advice ever since he chose the former New Hampshire governor to manage the White House.

In the latest episode over affirmative action, it was another senior Bush adviser, Gray, whom White House officials blame for the misjudgement.

Gray, 48, is known as a vigorous opponent of racial preferences in employment practices. And as a lawyer who has worked under Bush for more than a decade, he has carved out a fiefdom as the Administration’s chief voice on civil rights issue.

White House officials said Thursday that the fact that the controversial directive he drafted on hiring preferences went unquestioned until it had stirred political trouble for Bush simply underscores the potential for disaster in a structure in which power is concentrated in the hands of a few.

A less noticed snafu over the recently approved legislation to extend benefits to the unemployed, the officials said, served notice that Bush’s advisers were not yet attuned to the political winds. Under the Byzantine terms of the compromise worked out between the White House and Congress, some states were to be guaranteed only six weeks of extra assistance while others would receive 20 weeks.

What no one at the White House noticed until it was too late was that New Hampshire, mired in a downturn and preparing for the nation’s first presidential primary, was among those that would receive only six. Even though later revised under a House-Senate conference, the plan created an uproar in New Hampshire, where Republican professionals say they believe Bush could be held to blame.