NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush’s New Team Struggles With Campaign

At headquarters, the political heavies are sniping. Out on the campaign trail, field workers complain they are not seeing enough of the candidate.

And the candidate himself, when he does take to the stump, gets such shortsighted help from the staff that he goes into a routine visit to a grocers’ convention and comes out portrayed as a man amazed at the electronic wonders of an ordinary supermarket.

Such are the travails of presidential candidates who must do it the hard way--the inexperienced challengers who start from scratch without the legions of seasoned political handlers who know how to make a campaign sing.

But wait.

As the 1992 race enters its first serious phase, it is George Bush, the incumbent President and veteran of three national campaigns, whose team is struggling. High-level officials wrestle to get a grip on jobs they have never done before. The campaign staff and White House aides arm-wrestle over trivia, and tempers fray. Bush marches through a series of needless embarrassments.

“It isn’t too good right now,” concedes a GOP source who knows the President well.

“Three-quarters of the campaign is people speaker-phoning back and forth,” grouses a senior campaign aide.

The basic problem is clear enough: Time and circumstance have broken up the all-star team that guided Bush to victory in 1988 as well as the senior staff that managed the White House through most of his first term. Now the President is trying to build a new campaign organization and reorganize the White House staff simultaneously.

And he is having to do it at a time when the nation is suffering through an unexpectedly stubborn recession, his own poll ratings have tumbled and conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan is mounting a worrisome challenge in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary--now barely a week away.

Bush has been in such straits before--in the early days of the 1988 campaign, before that winning team jelled. He has plenty of time to set things right again. And the strength of the Democratic challenge is far from clear.

Still, the mood among those closest to Bush--while insistently optimistic about eventual victory--is surprisingly unsettled. Bush is preparing to make his candidacy for reelection official this week. Whenever an incumbent President seeks reelection, there is always friction between his senior White House aides and those heading the campaign organization. This time, the tensions are aggravated by the fact that nearly all are new to their jobs and feeling their way along--sometimes awkwardly.

“There’s no ill will, but there’s not a clear division of labor. No big fights, but the gears aren’t meshing,” a senior White House official said recently.

Moreover, no one in authority has the intimate ties to Bush himself, combined with the political savvy, that now-Secretary of State James A. Baker III had when he ramrodded the 1988 campaign.

And no replacement has yet been found for the street-tough political talents of the late Lee Atwater. “You don’t see anyone here who has that kind of magic,” said Robert A. Mosbacher, general chairman of the Bush campaign.

“What is missing,” said a source close to Bush, “is flesh-and-blood, sleeves-rolled-up, coffee-cups-at-11-at-night, real people. We don’t have that. Everyone is a white-shirt management type. But we’re not running a corporation. We’re running a campaign.”

Republican consultant Eddie Mahe thinks the Bush campaign needs “a street-mean politician at the table who would challenge every bit of gibberish someone wants to spout.”

An organizational chart would show Bush’s campaign is run by a troika: campaign Chairman Robert M. Teeter, general campaign Chairman Mosbacher and campaign manager Frederic V. Malek.

Malek is responsible for the nuts-and-bolts daily management, Mosbacher raises the money and Teeter is responsible for strategy and tactics.

For years a trusted figure on the Bush political team, Teeter is a pollster by profession, and, so far, he has left some insiders uncertain whether he has the temperament and scope to play a starring role as a strategic thinker.

“You have to understand,” one campaign official said. “Teeter’s never run a campaign before, and he’s having some trouble adjusting.”

Equally important, because of the Bush campaign’s late start, officials have no choice but to do too much at once.

At the new campaign headquarters in downtown Washington, they must try to do something about Bush’s still-dwindling approval ratings and the still-inadequate supply of office chairs. They must order stationery and dispatch surrogates to New Hampshire to battle Buchanan. They must fill positions on the campaign staff and patch holes in plans for the Super Tuesday primary elections next month in the South.

Meantime, senior aides shuttle six blocks each morning to the White House to try to coordinate with the equally new senior White House staff.

While all this has been going on, the President has struggled with a string of seemingly avoidable public embarrassments and not-quite-private quarrels between campaign officials and the White House staff:

* At the behest of campaign officials backed by White House Chief of Staff Samuel K. Skinner, the health care proposal Bush unveiled last Thursday was, at the last minute, made more vague than his policy advisers had recommended. The political shop had worried that some of the provisions might antagonize key voters.

* The campaign and the White House got into a flap, which became public, over so minor a point as the designation of a White House liaison to the campaign.

* When Bush celebrated the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the slain civil rights leader’s daughter chided: “How dare we celebrate!” and alluded to the tens of millions of Americans who are functionally illiterate or do not have health care. Bush listened impassively to the criticism clearly aimed at him.

* A senior White House official, pointing an accusatory finger at colleagues in the campaign organization, complained that the “jobs, jobs, jobs” message promoted by campaign officials for Bush’s trip to Asia last month may have been a good political message, but it only served to highlight the risks of foreign travel at a time when voters were focused on the economy.

* The President walked into an ambush by Democratic governors who had been invited to the White House as members of the National Governors’ Assn. and then used Bush’s own office to attack his economic recovery plans.

The President was taken aback by the partisan approach and angrily challenged his critics, looking, a dismayed supporter said, “impetuous” and “nasty.”

Then there was the episode at the National Grocers Assn. convention, when Bush was led through a display of electronic check-out equipment and, asked to react on camera, responded with gee-whiz politeness that some viewers thought “just underscored the fact he’s a rich guy who doesn’t understand working Americans going to the grocery store all the time,” in the words of a Republican strategist.

Pondering such missteps, Malek said recently: “We are not fully up to speed. We are not yet fully at the levels I would expect to see a month from now.”

“We’re doing everything we can to put it on track,” Skinner said.

But the problems may be deeper than just getting the campaign organization up to speed.

“There is a fundamental question of whether the White House will run the campaign or whether the campaign will run the White House. That has yet to be determined,” said a Republican strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The person who is key to that is Sam Skinner.”

The White House staff, meanwhile, is complaining that “decisions are being reversed, re-reversed and reversed a third time, depending on who Skinner’s talking to,” the strategist said.

“The campaign thinks we should do X, the White House senior staff thinks we should do Y and Bush and (Vice President Dan) Quayle think Z,” another senior White House aide said. Eventually, such disputes get resolved in what is coming to be known as “the funnel,” the Teeter-Skinner connection, or by the President, the ultimate decision-maker.

Four years ago, Bush’s campaign seemed adrift through much of the spring and summer, and a six-man group at the top of the hierarchy appeared unable to make decisions quickly and smoothly. Much of that changed when Baker gave up his post as secretary of the Treasury and took the campaign reins.

“There was tremendous jealousy and rivalry and fighting, and the only guy who could knock heads and put it together was Jim,” said one source close to the White House. “There is nobody there now.”

Not to worry, said Quayle in a recent conversation. Yes, the new team must fill “different assignments,” but “the bench is deep” and “will serve us very well,” he said.

Still, a Republican strategist argued that “they miss Baker to make decisions, and they miss the skilled political mind of Atwater,” the rough-and-tumble political operative from South Carolina who liked to report that he picked up his political wisdom at wrestling matches or from reading the tabloid press, rather than from cocktail parties inside the Beltway ringing the nation’s capital.

Atwater died of a brain tumor last April.

Teeter, who has worked for Republican candidates for more than 20 years, has been most closely associated with Bush, as the President’s poll-taker.

“He’s looked at as much survey data as anyone in this country,” Mahe said. Another Republican source added: “Teeter has numbers and issues. He does not have grass-roots experience.”

“You’re not going to duplicate (Atwater) exactly,” said Charles Black, a conservative political consultant who has signed on as a senior adviser to the Bush campaign. “But Teeter and I have been around a few times. We don’t go to ‘wrassling’ matches or read the National Enquirer, but we read the data and talk to people outside the Beltway. We can come pretty close.”

Teeter’s nominal boss is former Commerce Secretary Mosbacher, the campaign’s general chairman. Mosbacher is widely seen as “Bush’s pal” in the organization, stemming from his 33 years at Bush’s side--a friendship that predates the beginning of Bush’s political career in Texas. However, Mosbacher is not seen as a strategic thinker.

“Mosbacher is a fund-raiser. That’s it. He knows where the money is,” said a Republican close to the White House.

Nor is Malek, the campaign manager, viewed as a key political operator. Malek, who held a variety of positions in the Richard M. Nixon Administration, was vice chairman of Northwest Airlines Inc. before joining the Bush campaign.

“He’s a tremendous manager of systems and people. But he’s not going to be a force in the political decisions,” Mahe predicted.

“There is still no political strategist at the campaign or the White House,” said another Republican consultant.

Bush allies are waiting anxiously for Richard N. Bond, the President’s choice to head the Republican National Committee during the election year, to begin having an impact. Bond, if anyone, is seen as a savvy political operator with skills like Atwater.

“He knows what politics is, knows who the players are, knows who the players are at the grass-roots level,” said one admirer. “Teeter is a numbers cruncher. Rich approaches (the campaign) from the grass-roots level. There’s going to be a vacuum, and, by natural flow, Rich is going to have influence.”

Besides, he predicted, experience indicates that over the course of the campaign, changes will be made.

“It always happens. A glitch here. A glitch there. This is not the campaign team that will be in place in September,” he said.