Aides Expect Baker to Run Bush Campaign

Bush Administration and campaign aides increasingly expect the President to ask Secretary of State James A. Baker III to run his flagging reelection campaign, officials said Tuesday.

The move would be born of widespread frustration over the sputtering start of the President’s campaign, which has failed to lift Bush out of a virtual three-way tie in most polls with Democrat Bill Clinton and independent Ross Perot.

Senior officials said they do not believe that Bush has made a final decision to ask Baker to switch jobs and added that the issue probably will be determined solely by the two men, who have been close political associates since the 1960s.

But at the State Department and within the President’s campaign, there is mounting anticipation that the move will occur--and speculation that Bush and Baker will make their decision this week, when they spend two days alone on a fishing trip on Baker’s Wyoming ranch.

“If the President of the United States asks him to do it, he’ll do it,” one Baker aide predicted.

“It’s so sensitive, only the two of them will be involved,” said a longtime political aide to both Bush and Baker. “But if the President decides that he can’t win with what he’s got, he may well ask Baker to help out.”

Several officials at the highest levels of the Bush campaign, who previously had dismissed the likelihood of such a shift, were said to have concluded that the Bush team may be unable to win without Baker’s managerial skill.

Baker managed Bush’s unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1980 and his successful campaign in 1988.

Bush and Baker both have ducked the question of whether a Baker move to the campaign is imminent. When reporters accompanying Bush on a trip to California’s Sequoia National Park asked him about the issue, the President replied, “He and I are going fishing.”

Asked specifically if Baker would go to the White House, Bush said, “Pure fishing.”

Baker, asked the same question, said simply, “We haven’t discussed it.”

“There are no plans for Secretary Baker to leave,” White House Chief of Staff Samuel K. Skinner declared.

And Torie Clarke, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, dismissed the talk of a Baker move--but acknowledged that Washington is “all atwitter” over the idea.

But one official said that the secretary of state’s schedule is being kept clear of binding commitments this fall in case he leaves his job. A senior official denied that Baker’s schedule has been devised with the campaign in mind, but added, “Anything is doable.”

After his fishing trip with Bush, Baker is scheduled to fly to the Middle East this weekend to try to inject new momentum into the Middle East peace talks that he launched last year.

But after that trip and an expected visit to Washington by Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s newly elected prime minister, in early August, Baker has no major diplomatic tasks on his calendar.

The most discussed scenario within the Bush camp sees Baker moving from the State Department to the White House sometime in the next few weeks, probably before the Republican National Convention.

One arrangement being discussed among senior Bush advisers would call for Baker to take a leave of absence from the State Department and move to the White House as a senior counselor to Bush.

Such a plan would offer the face-saving advantage of allowing Skinner to keep his job as White house chief of staff while installing Baker in a position from which he could oversee both the White House and the campaign.

Aides were said to have suggested portraying the shift in positive terms, as a way to allow Baker to join Bush and Skinner in “forging an American agenda for the next four years.”

Under that scenario, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, a veteran of almost 30 years in the State Department, was reportedly likely to serve as acting secretary of state until the election--the job he already performs when Baker is on vacation.

Officials were said to hold no illusion that Baker would bring any kind of magic to the difficult task of overcoming negative public perceptions of Bush. And there also were rumors that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, not Baker, might be asked to come over to the White House.

Times staff writers Douglas Jehl in New York and James Gerstenzang, traveling with President Bush in California, contributed to this story.