Bush Picks Skinner to Replace Sununu : White House: The new chief of staff will be a ‘firm right hand,’ the President says. He names his reelection team, saying he will win ‘because I’m a good President.’

President Bush named Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner as his new chief of staff Thursday and moved to ignite his sputtering reelection campaign by picking a group of longtime advisers to direct it.

“Sam Skinner takes over as a firm right hand at the time when the nation’s economy presents a difficult challenge,” the President said.

In his first press conference after a month of bad news and political confusion, Bush said he is confident that he will win reelection in November, regardless of the condition of the economy, “because I’m a good President.”

Skinner’s task in the coming months is crucial: He must coordinate the President’s schedule and public message--and all other White House activities--with the work of the campaign organization and oversee the preparation of a new economic program that Bush pledged to unveil in his State of the Union message the end of January.

With Bush’s standing in public opinion polls sinking as public concern about the economy grows deeper, the White House has the overriding goal of restoring confidence that the economy will rebound.

Bush said it was the economy that caused his popularity to drop, saying: “When the economy goes down, a President takes the hits.”

White House officials and other senior Republicans hope that the departure of Skinner’s predecessor, John H. Sununu, will reduce the internal friction and animosity that contributed to the appearance of disarray in Bush’s domestic policy agenda and discouraged the President’s longtime allies from joining his campaign.

Seeking to calm the mood in the White House, Bush took the unusual step of visiting the senior staff meeting there Thursday morning to reassure his aides that no major shake-up was planned.

In a reflection of the connection between the economy and the campaign, even as he unveiled the composition of his political team, Bush announced at the news conference that he will speed up $9.7 billion in government spending to pump money into the economy at a quicker pace. The money, which Bush called “a shot in the arm,” had already been allocated, and will be spent on a variety of agriculture, housing loan, environmental, transportation and Pentagon programs.

But, the President said: “Clearly we must do more.”

Asked whether he is “willing to run” on the question, “are you better off today than you were four years ago?”--the question Ronald Reagan used effectively in his campaign against Jimmy Carter in 1980--Bush said that he is “quite confident” that by Election Day 11 months from now, “this economy will be much, much better.”

As expected, Bush said that Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher will leave his Cabinet post to become general chairman of the campaign organization. The departures of Mosbacher and Skinner will mark the third and fourth changes in Bush’s original Cabinet.

Pollster Robert Teeter, who Bush said “worked with me in the trenches for many years,” will be the campaign chairman and chief political strategist.

Frederic V. Malek, vice chairman of Northwest Airlines, will be campaign manager with responsibility for day-to-day operations. He had dropped out of the 1988 Bush campaign organization after it was disclosed that as an aide in the Richard M. Nixon White House, he carried out orders to determine how many Jews were involved in compiling government economic statistics.

Others given senior positions in the campaign will be Charles R. Black Jr. and Richard N. Bond, Republican political consultants who have worked with Bush in the past, and Mary Matalin, chief of staff at the Republican National Committee.

While Bush aides and political allies profess to be unconcerned about his drop in public opinion polls--from sky-high approval ratings hovering around 90% at the end of the Persian Gulf War to barely half that now--the race for the presidency is suddenly looking more competitive. So, Bush needs not only to restore confidence in the economy but, in the near term, to fend off the challenge posed by David Duke of Louisiana and one expected from conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan.

Duke built his unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana this autumn around appeals aimed directly at white voters.

Sununu was seen as one of Bush’s key links to the same conservatives to whom Buchanan is expected to pitch his appeal. The columnist is not expected to deny Bush the Republican presidential nomination but to pressure him to hew to a more conservative agenda.

Skinner, 53, is a former Illinois political figure who has drawn some grumbling from Republican conservatives because he favors a woman’s right to choose an abortion, Republican sources said. “I think there’s more trouble than people are expressing,” one said.

In addition to dealing with such critics, Skinner will need to encourage the Cabinet to reassert itself, some sources close to the White House said, after three years of Sununu’s heavy-handed tactics. He also will have to rein in Budget Director Richard G. Darman, who had struck up a powerful alliance with Sununu, they said.

And, he will have a full campaign portfolio.

Bond, speaking with reporters after Bush’s announcement, predicted that the power sharing between the White House and the campaign will be smooth. He referred to a previous campaign, in which many current members of the Bush Administration and political team--among them Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Teeter--shared political and Administration duties.

The year was 1976, and they were deeply involved in Gerald R. Ford’s reelection campaign.

That was an example, Bond said, of “how well it worked for the White House.”

Ford, however, lost the election.

“Simply an aberration,” Bond said.

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl contributed to this story.

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