Clinton Works Quietly on New Administration

Between congratulatory telephone conversations from world leaders, President-elect Bill Clinton wrestled privately Thursday with what he called the mind-boggling task of putting a new Democratic Administration in place after 12 years of political exile.

Weighed down with a box of briefing books presented to him by top transition planners, Clinton stayed mostly out of public sight on the second day after his election. The aftermath of victory brought new recognition of what Clinton called the “immense amount of work to be done.”

There were signs that the close-knit Clinton organization was fraying a bit without clear signals from Clinton about the steps to be taken as the governor prepares to take power. No formal announcements were made, and Clinton aides acknowledged that no decisions had been reached.

Even the question of who will take charge of the Clinton transition team remained unsettled. Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Kantor’s bid for leadership was said to be complicated by internal frictions stemming from the campaign, of which he was chairman.

Aides said Clinton still had fundamental choices to make about the structure and character of an operation whose focus must now shift abruptly from politics to policy.

The pace of the transition process and Clinton’s relative silence have given rise to questions about whether the governor’s campaign was sufficiently organized for victory. Although spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers defended the pace as natural so soon after Election Day, she acknowledged that “there’s a lot more to be done.”

With the series of morning telephone calls, the President-elect took time out from his labors to exchange words with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela and the leaders of Britain, Mexico, Canada and Italy.

But he remained clearly conscious of his pledge not to allow domestic issues to be upstaged by foreign affairs, describing the conversations as non-substantive. He also refused to comment on the prospect that the Bush Administration’s decision Thursday to levy punitive tariffs on some European goods might fuel an international trade war.

“We’ve got one President,” he said. “He has to make those decisions. I don’t want to get in the way.”

Clinton and his campaign seemed particularly reluctant to discuss, except in the most general terms, his conversation with Yeltsin, who faces mounting opposition at home from Russian hard-liners.

News accounts from Moscow indicated that the conversation between the two leaders included talk about the nations’ nuclear and chemical arsenals, and said the Russian Foreign Ministry had dispatched a separate communique to the Clinton camp that raised the possibility of a Clinton-Yeltsin summit.

But Clinton would say only that he and Yeltsin had “just talked about what he was doing,” and Myers refused to elaborate about any of the exchanges. “They were all very I-look-forward-to-working-with-you conversations,” Clinton said Thursday morning.

Meanwhile, President Bush met with his Cabinet at the White House for the first time since voters rejected his reelection bid. He made clear that he no longer planned to meet with Yeltsin in a summit of his own later this year.

Bush had pledged to make the trip after Yeltsin traveled to Washington in February. But he told reporters before the Cabinet meeting: “I have no plans to go to Moscow.”

Associates said he seemed hurt in defeat, and he fended off reporters’ efforts to ask further questions. He and his wife, Barbara, left the White House by helicopter for a four-day weekend in the mountain isolation of the presidential compound in Camp David, Md.

In Dallas, where independent candidate Ross Perot maintained his headquarters, only vestiges remained of what proved to be the most successful third-party candidacy in 80 years. Amid box-packing and file-sorting, spokeswoman Sharon Holman said the whole operation would be closed by today.

Clinton, for his part, emerged before dawn from his Little Rock home for a morning jog and a workout at a nearby YMCA. He spent the morning in his Statehouse office and returned to the governor’s mansion for a series of afternoon meetings with top aides. He also stopped by a party organized by his campaign staff.

But associates said he seemed still to be feeling the exhaustion accumulated over 13 months of campaigning that ended with an almost sleepless final 72-hour sprint.

Aides who saw him Wednesday night said he wore a dull stare of fatigue. When Democratic National Committee Chairman Ronald H. Brown tried to telephone the normally nocturnal Clinton at his mansion shortly after 10 p.m. that evening, he was told that the governor was asleep.

In a television interview a few hours earlier, Clinton described himself as “happy, but exhausted about the work that has to be done.” He was expected to continue with a series of meetings today, but Myers said she did not expect him to make any major announcements before a planned quiet weekend in Little Rock.

Of the many unanswered questions about the Clinton transition, the most important may be the identity of its appointed leader. Besides Kantor, those believed to be under consideration for the top job include Eli Segal, the campaign chief of staff; Vernon E. Jordan Jr., the civil rights leader, and Richard W. Riley, the former governor of South Carolina.

Myers dismissed as “grossly exaggerated” news accounts suggesting that senior Clinton advisers had opposed the potential selection of Kantor. Other aides noted that Kantor’s current role as a member of the transition planning team was ceded to him in part because of his frequent squabbles with the campaign’s top strategists, some of whom are expected to follow Clinton to the White House.

One indication of how secretive the transition process has become came late Thursday afternoon when George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s campaign communications director, refused to say whether he had been among those who met with the governor earlier in the day.

Asked if he had a role in the transition, Stephanopoulos replied: “I don’t know.”

The sudden void of hard news so soon after a raucous campaign left reporters and television news teams in Little Rock in a state of nervous anticipation. When Warren Christopher, the former deputy secretary of state and a member of Clinton’s transition-planning team, was spotted lunching with a top foreign-policy aide, camera crews jostled for position at the door of the hotel restaurant in hope that he might part with some scrap of intelligence.

He did not oblige, other than to say that things were moving smoothly, but the cameras continued to track him across the lobby and out onto the street.

Although Clinton had pledged Wednesday to address economic issues with “a laserlike focus,” Myers stressed that the governor was under no specific pressure to issue decisions quickly.

And Bruce Reed, the campaign’s issues director, said Clinton felt no qualms in ignoring the tradition of a post-election news conference. “He ran as a different kind of Democrat and he’s going to have a different kind of presidency,” Reed said.

Times staff writers Ronald Brownstein, John M. Broder and James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.