President Adjusts Staff to Help Get Message Out

In advance of his State of the Union speech, President Bush moved Sunday to strengthen White House communications and halt a perceived failure to get his message out.

As Bush prayed and sang at a church service in a black neighborhood, there were also indications that the White House wished to play down expectations for the Tuesday night speech.

White House Chief of Staff Samuel K. Skinner said Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater will now also be director of communications and work as a presidential counselor to coordinate the White House message.

For some months, White House officials have believed Bush’s political troubles stem in part from a failure to communicate.

Many public opinion polls say Americans feel Bush spends too much time on foreign policy and not enough on domestic affairs, a view Skinner, appearing on ABC-TV’s “This Week with David Brinkley,” said was inaccurate and needed to be reversed as Bush enters his reelection campaign.

The perception of Bush’s domestic policy weakness was evident at services at Lomax AME Zion Church in Arlington, Va., attended by Bush, his wife, Barbara, and their daughter, Dorothy Bush Leblond.

Bishop J. Clinton Hoggard prayed for help at home as part of a two-hour service. “Help us to address ourselves to human suffering that is all about us, not only in the distant lands, but present here in our own land,” Hoggard said.

Bush told the congregation that the problems in America’s inner cities stem largely from the decline of the family and that every law he proposed would be aimed at reversing that trend.

The latest Bush staff shake-up will give Fitzwater more control over the content of the President’s many speeches and appearances. One complaint within the White House has been that the speech writers have worked on their own projects without enough coordination.

The shake-up comes during final preparations for the State of the Union speech.

Skinner said that “the expectations of what the State of the Union is all about are really misplaced,” stressing that the speech will only begin the process of putting economic recovery plans into effect, and is not a sudden cure-all.