Campaigning for Promotion : Encouraged by Their Man’s Lead in the Polls, Democrats Are Drooling Over the Possibility of Punching the Clock at a Clinton White House

At this moment, there are at least 500 people in the United States convinced, just convinced, that they are on the list to be the next attorney general.

--Senior aide to Gov. Bill Clinton

For almost 12 years, they’ve wandered in political exile--working in K Street law firms, lobbying Congress or slavishly serving it, grading papers of irritating students--when they’d rather be here, at the center of the world, writing memos to the President.

For 12 years, Democrats have been out. But now there’s a chance they’ll be in, and the carpets of some of the capital’s finest restaurants are soaked as Dems salivate over who might get what job in the Clinton White House.

Never mind that they’re counting electoral votes before they’ve been cast. Or that George Bush has made it clear that he thinks it’s too soon for Democrats to measure for drapes in his Oval Office. It’s been a long time between White House dinners, and there are young Democrats aching to talk to a cabinet secretary on a cellular phone.

The talk these days is of little else.

“Gee, I haven’t had a conversation about who’s gonna get what job since, well, let’s see, hmmmmm, I’d say since breakfast,” says John White, a former Democratic National Committee chairman.

The nature of Washington, of course, is to obsess. And today’s obsession, naturally, is the election.

But among Democrats, the focus is as intense on Clinton’s cabinet as it is on his chances of winning. And it’s not just future secretaries of state and possible chiefs of staff quietly wondering about the price of Bethesda real estate; it’s also potential deputy under secretaries of this and special assistants to that.

“There are people in their 40s, 50s and 60s who are horny for federal policy power and whose testosterone is kicking into overdrive now that Bill is 15 points ahead in the polls,” says Mark Green, New York’s Consumer Affairs Commissioner who has been mentioned as a possible Federal Trade Commission chairman.

Lists of possibles have surfaced recently in newspapers, newsletters and magazines. Some speculation is idea-driven--a natural progression from talking about conflicting viewpoints among Clinton advisers on foreign affairs and economics to wondering who would run such policy if he is elected.

So, if Harvard University professor Robert Reich and Progressive Policy Institute Vice President Rob Shapiro are top economic advisers, then they’re naturals for chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, right? And if Mickey Kantor and Betsey Wright are key aides, aren’t they then naturals for chief of staff? Sure, why not?

But more interesting are craven attempts to get on these short lists.

Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who spent eight years in government, has been tracking the Op-Ed Page of the New York Times recently for ambition quotients.

“I see an academic writing about his view of how to solve the crisis in the Middle East and I think to myself, ‘Well, that’s his calling card,’ ” Hess says with a chuckle.

In particular, the boldest and baldest in think tanks and academia are angling to showcase their ideas, he says. Presumably, they wouldn’t want to appear too eager by faxing their resumes to Clinton’s Little Rock headquarters--just as a $100,000 contributor is not going to come right out and demand an ambassadorship.

Still, Hess notes a lot of subtle clawing: “There are people quietly circulating their resumes to a good friend, say, who has a good friend who knew Hillary in the 11th grade.”

Increasingly, these FOBs (Friends of Bill) are flocking to volunteer in the campaign’s last days. Indeed, so many people now claim that they knew “Bill” when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, it’s a wonder the British isle didn’t sink into the English Channel.

Many experts expect Clinton to look beyond this inbred circle and draw from a broad variety of people. They expect him to tap former governors and education commissioners who were partners in suffering with him during the fallow 1980s. They expect he will also look to unknowns who have creative ideas for “reinventing government” rather than the usual suspects who have lurked in government’s shadows for decades.

Of course, that’s what people predicted that other Southern governor would do after his 1976 election. In a Rolling Stone interview, Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter’s campaign manager, was then quoted saying:

“If, after the inauguration, you find a Cy Vance as secretary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinkski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit. But that’s not going to happen. You’re going to see new faces, new ideas. The government is going to be run by people you have never heard of.”

Well, Vance did become secretary of state, Brzezinkski was indeed the national security adviser and Jordan seemed to enjoy being chief of staff. Which only suggests that while he’s busy reinventing government with his New Covenant, Clinton may also be forced to rely on the experience of Beltway Elders.

But for FOB wanna-bes who don’t know Clinton personally, special tactics are in order. Tony Podesta, a Washington political consultant, reports that he had dinner with a hungry Congressman last week who sought advice on how best to put in a cabinet bid.

“Should I start now or wait until after election?” the Congressman asked. “Who should I talk to? Mickey Kantor? I don’t know this guy Warren Christopher (former deputy secretary of state, now rumored in line for secretary of state), and I’ve never been to a governors’ meeting in Washington.”

Podesta says that he offered the hot conventional wisdom: “For anybody who wants a job in the Clinton Administration, the place to be is Little Rock on Columbus Day Weekend.” That’s when the campaign will hold a retreat with Clinton and Al Gore for contributors prepared to pony up between $1,000 and $10,000.

“I’ve talked to a lot of people who are scraping together $10,000 in order to get to know people better (who) they couldn’t have cared less about six months ago,” he says.

For New Yorkers who have only recently figured out that Little Rock is in Arkansas, the salon speculation borders on the Tom Wolfian.

One liberal-chic woman who has high hopes for her husband’s future in Clinton’s White House has already told her hairdresser that she’ll need “a great ‘do for the inaugural” and is saving for a fabulous new gown. Another politically wired New Yorker has shuttled several times to Washington to look at houses and at private schools for his kids.

In fact, it has been duly reported in Washington that copies of the Plum Book, the unofficial name for the directory Congress issues every four years of the 3,000 prime (plum) jobs appointed by the President, have been sold out for weeks.

But there’s also been a run on the Prune Book.

This publication, issued by the Center for Excellence in Government, describes the 100 most demanding jobs in terms of managerial skills.

Explains Mark Abramson, the group’s executive director: “A prune, you see, is an experienced plum.”

Right now, it’s hard to take the high road without people thinking you’re pandering.

Several blue-chip commissions have sprouted like daffodils before the last snow. Most aim to “rethink,” “restructure” or “reinvent” the federal government for the next President. While this type of federal perestroika may be both necessary and opportune, it can’t help but be political.

“People use these commissions as their calling cards,” says one source who is on one such group. “You create a bunch of ideas, get on the McNeil-Lehrer show and use the ideas as a way of networking your way to the White House.”

But, he cautions: “Don’t be too cynical about this. Some of these guys will go from $500,000 a year to $100,000 a year all too gladly to be undersecretary of state. There’s something noble in that.”

A bipartisan commission was announced last week by the Carnegie Endowment and Institute for International Economics to examine how the U.S. government should be reorganized to meet the challenges of the post-Cold War world. A four-page press release introducing the commission never mentioned the 1992 presidential election.

But the seventh paragraph of the release said: “The new commission will issue its report in early November.”

Why not late December? Why not give it six months? one might ask of a study that hopes to redefine a bureaucracy that has evolved during the last 50 years.

Richard Holbrooke, co-chairman of the commission (and who has been the Zelig of short-lists for high Administration positions since he left government more than a decade ago), insists that the commission isn’t just aimed at helping Clinton select a cabinet:

“We really hope that whoever is elected, whether Bush is reelected or Clinton wins, will set aside politics long enough to allow us to do what Truman and the Republican Congress did from 1947 to 1949, which is to find a new policy and new organization to deal with what was going on in the world.”

Holbrooke, mentioned as a possible undersecretary of state for policy under Clinton, notes that he would prefer a Democrat on Pennsylvania Avenue: “Personality does make a difference; it does matter whether there is a strong or weak secretary of state.”

So does he want to be that secretary of state?

“That kind of game is utterly ridiculous,” he snaps undiplomatically. “The people who will make these decisions haven’t thought about them yet, and the people who are talking about them won’t make the decisions.”

New York Consumer Affairs Commissioner Green coordinated a similarly comprehensive study of how to shake up and take over the federal government. The list of 77 authors of the study reads like a Who’s Who of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Would these people like to work for Bill Clinton?

“Hey, who knows?” says Green, laughing at the prospect of all those liberals in the avowedly moderate Clinton’s camp. “I, for one, have a great job. Who else do you know wakes up in the morning and if he wants to sue somebody, just sues ‘em? I do.”

On the flip side of all this premature job-jockeying are Republicans preparing to enter the free market they profess to love so dearly.

Several reporters have noted that they’re hearing from assistant secretaries who in the past never deigned to return phone calls. Now, they are relentlessly seeking visibility while looking for a place to park their expertise in the private sector.

One senior aide on Capitol Hill also notes that overseas Republican-appointees are an increasingly dispirited bunch.

“You can tell when an Administration is on the ropes when career foreign service types start to treat political appointees with contempt. . . . You see quite a bit of that now.”

But if it gives these Republicans any comfort, there are Clinton campaign people who also dread the implications of a tectonic shift in administrations.

“I’m really not looking forward to the transition,” says one senior Clinton aide. “I’ve seen a couple of these, working for governors. All of a sudden, your ‘best friends’ are at your throat.”