Early Praise for Skinner Tempered by Complaints : White House: Chief of staff tackled big problems, but now some are grumbling about his management style.

Four months after assuming control of a White House staff thoroughly demoralized by John H. Sununu’s troubled three-year reign, Chief of Staff Samuel K. Skinner is struggling to hit his stride in an unforgiving environment made even more intense by the pressures of a presidential election campaign.

The blunt, boisterous Skinner, who served as secretary of transportation before Bush drafted him to replace the imperious Sununu, received good marks for tackling some of the biggest problems facing the White House upon his arrival.

But now, there is a strong undercurrent of grumbling about Skinner’s performance.

Observers within the White House, the campaign team and the President’s circle of longtime friends and advisers suggest that, for all his admirable qualities and initial successes, Skinner seems to display a style too loose for the pressures of his new job. In the words of one close Bush adviser, he almost seems to be “a man miscast.”

The critics cite several problem areas: Skinner’s penchant for thinking out loud, a tendency to delay decisions, an unwillingness to impose authority over the Bush campaign organization. According to one senior White House official, some high-level presidential confidants, including Secretary of State James A. Baker III, have become “very concerned” about the inability of Skinner and his new team to work efficiently.

Bush himself is said to have spoken with some of his longtime advisers about the problems.

And his eldest son, George W. Bush, who has long played a behind-the-scenes role delving into problem areas for his father, has spent the past week at the White House. His presence is seen as a signal that he is embarking on another trouble-shooting mission--as he did in the stormy days before Sununu’s departure.

There is even quiet, tentative talk of another White House staff reorganization--not necessarily involving Skinner, but possibly affecting other top aides. “I’d predict there will be a shake-up . . . maybe by next month,” the senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The critique of Skinner has ironic overtones: To some extent, insiders concede, he is being faulted for not being more like his predecessor.

“You want a godfather, sitting in a darkened office, talking quietly and making decisions,” one senior staff member said, seemingly oblivious to the criticism he heaped on Sununu last autumn. “Sometimes, you wish Sununu was back.”

Bush, however, dismisses the complaints about continuing disarray within the White House as just so much Washington gossip.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” the President said to reporters accompanying him on an early morning stroll last week. “You know and I know that there’s periodic stories of this nature. I’ve seen it in every single Administration--Democrat or Republican. I discount it. I think we’ve got an outstanding staff.”

And at a press conference on Friday, Bush denied that his son’s presence at the White House is a sign of his own dissatisfaction with his staff.

For all the grumbling, most White House insiders acknowledge that Skinner did well when confronted with a daunting set of problems.

Last Dec. 16, when Skinner walked into his new office, the economy had just headed south again. There were no firm plans for how to handle the President’s crucial State of the Union speech, scheduled for Jan. 28. The first primary election was only two months away, but Bush’s campaign organization had not taken form. And the White House staff, entering a political test unlike any it had faced, was in the dumps.

It was, in the words of a senior White House official, “a hell of a mess.”

One of Skinner’s vows was to avoid the mistakes of his predecessor. Sununu’s fall from grace had followed a familiar pattern: He lost favor not only with competing power centers, in this case congressional leaders, but, more important, with other key figures in the Administration, including his boss, the President. Sununu’s use of Air Force jets to carry him on personal trips was not the primary cause of his downfall, but it became a catalyst by drawing attention to the chief of staff’s officious, overbearing manner.

As if to underscore the point that things would be different, Skinner decided shortly after his appointment to book a weekend trip back home to Chicago--where he served as U.S. attorney--on a regularly scheduled commercial flight--coach seat, please.

The initial challenge facing Skinner was to perform a type of political triage that would allow him to tackle the biggest problems and to set aside the less significant--or temporarily impossible--tasks. In that, he appears to have succeeded.

Today, the economy is showing signs of improvement. The President’s renomination seems assured. His political team has turned its attention from the faded challenge posed by Republican challenger Patrick J. Buchanan to focus on the general election campaign.

“The big goals have been achieved,” White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said. “We’ve organized the White House. We’ve organized the campaign. We’re winning the primaries. The achievements have been significant under the circumstances.”

Skinner, one of his admirers in the White House said, “has a personal style that is totally different from his predecessor. He is open with people. He is honest. He doesn’t try to manipulate people. He’s not deceptive or conniving. These are traits the staff around here tends to appreciate.”

They are appreciated too by Bush, Skinner’s boss, social companion and occasional golfing partner.

On the other hand, Skinner can be demanding, the White House admirer said. “He has a short attention span. A loud personality, if you will.”

Even the President is said to have become irked at Skinner for over-scheduling a hectic campaign trip across the South in the week leading up to Super Tuesday last month.

And there have been other incidents. Skinner lashed out at Buchanan publicly, suggesting that Buchanan was an anti-Semite.

“He has injected himself into the political race,” one longtime Bush adviser said. “That’s not the role of a chief of staff.”

At a time when the White House was trying to maintain smooth relations with Congress, Skinner assailed Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) as “a crass politician . . . who puts politics above his country.”

“He’s making the mistake any chief of staff makes, not understanding the small margin for error in the White House,” an experienced White House insider remarked. “It is very small. It can get you in trouble if you’re a think-out-loud kind of person.”

One of the first steps Skinner took upon arriving at the White House was to institute what one aide scornfully called a “time and motion” study of staff operations, under the direction of Eugene R. Croisant, an old friend from Skinner’s early career at IBM.

“The guy (Croisant) had very little relevance to us,” a senior White House official said. “A very disruptive influence. Everyone on the President’s staff was upset about the fella.”

Indeed, Skinner’s efforts to reorganize the White House have been a source of continuing complaints. One insider said, “We didn’t need the whole White House staff reorganized in the fourth year.”

In an interview, Skinner said much of the grousing is unjustified.

His comment on Buchanan was “a legitimate, honest statement,” Skinner said, and he does not regret it. But, he added, “you haven’t heard me say it since.”

Likewise, Skinner said, Mitchell was taking a partisan approach to Bush’s economic recovery plan right from the beginning, “and somebody’s got to say it.”

As for the Croisant study, it “allowed me to validate some of the things I was being told,” Skinner said. “It was accurate. Any organization has problems . . . . It allowed me to get a good feel for what we had to do.”

Skinner also resents the complaints about the pace of his decision-making. “I think that’s unfair,” he said. “If anything, I think people push things to get them to us. I want to get them to the President sooner.”

Skinner remains defensive about the restructuring effort, although, by various accounts from inside the White House, the changes added to initial disarray and dissatisfaction.

Under the direction of Clayton K. Yeutter, newly moved from the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee to become White House counselor for domestic policy, the former Economic Policy Council and the Domestic Policy Council have been folded into a Policy Coordinating Group. This unit is intended to function much as the National Security Council does in the foreign policy arena, overseeing related elements of domestic, social and economic policy and coordinating government actions, Yeutter said.

Fitzwater has taken over as communications chief, responsible not only for day-to-day operations in the White House press office, but also for laying out long-range efforts to project the President’s message.

But the dual role has its built-in frustrations, forcing Fitzwater to deal with immediate problems and to simultaneously press his colleagues to tackle issues that might not bubble to the surface for several months. Those frustrations surfaced recently in a blowup between Fitzwater and Deputy Chief of Staff W. Henson Moore, a key Skinner appointee.

By bringing in Yeutter, a former agriculture secretary, and Moore, a former deputy energy secretary, Skinner may have traded in a White House upper management that had been too slim on Washington heavyweights for one that has “too many chiefs, not enough Indians,” in the words of one colleague.

“They all think when they’re in a meeting they are all in charge. None of them thinks he’s the guy to take notes at a meeting and then follow up on something. All these guys think something’s going to happen without putting hands on,” he said.

The result, he said, is “a kind of paralysis.”

Perhaps Skinner’s biggest challenge, however, is that of reaching a working relationship with the Bush/Quayle reelection campaign in general and campaign chairman Robert S. Teeter in particular.

“They’re still trying to sort out responsibilities between Teeter and Skinner,” a senior White House staff member said.