LOOKING AT Clinton’s America : Now--Let the Governing Begin

President-elect Bill Clinton has pledged to appoint a Cabinet that looks like America. While his first round of appointments to key economic posts looked more like Washington and Wall Street than the rest of the country, balancing had already begun by Friday, and there seems little doubt that by the time he is finished, the new President will be surrounded by a group of advisers who include minorities, whites, women and men. The harder question is what this team will do for America.

The four white men appointed to head the economic team are hardly a diverse lot. What unites them is not simply their race and gender, but their common status as Washington-Wall Street insiders and their common view of economic priorities. In many people’s minds, Washington politicians and New York bankers are part of the problem, not the solution. At moments during the campaign, even Clinton seemed to suggest as much.

Nonetheless, in the first round of news stories, Sen. Lloyd M. Bentsen of Texas, Rep. Leon E. Panetta of California and Wall Street bankers Roger C. Altman and Robert E. Rubin were portrayed as non-ideological managers, capable of implementing the President’s program rather than as philosophers who might seek to shape one of their own. But for better or worse, they are clearly more than that. Bentsen is a man of great stature and distinction, as smart and shrewd a Democrat as one could find in Washington. He is also a economic conservative, a longtime supporter of tax breaks for the oil and gas industry and of tax incentives for the wealthy to save.

Panetta, along with his newly appointed deputy Alice Rivlin, are deficit hounds, focused first and foremost not on stimulating the economy but on reducing the deficit, a perspective they share with Wall Street. Indeed, both Panetta and Rivlin criticized candidate Clinton’s economic plans for paying too little attention to the deficit. Robert B. Reich, the leading liberal economic policy adviser to the President-elect, also joined the Cabinet last week, but he did so as secretary of Labor, not as a member of the top economic team.

It remains to be seen how this team will refine Clinton’s pledge to raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, increase public spending and cut the deficit. Certainly, they have the skills--the legislative know-how, the management ability and the Washington and Wall Street contacts--to push a plan through Congress and the bureaucracy, and to win the support of the markets.

But the simple fact is: There is no plan, at least not yet. As Panetta pointed out in the past, the numbers in the campaign didn’t add up; they don’t need to--in campaigns. Legislation requires details, which is where one finds the devil. In working out the details, the question is how much the new President will follow his team’s lead, and how much they will follow his.

The same is true of political reform. Through his appointments of Bentsen and Panetta, the President-elect has pledged to break the “gridlock” in Washington. Clinton is engaged in a deft courtship of Congress, a task at which he excels. Having campaigned as an outsider who decried the “brain-dead politics” of Washington, Clinton went to Capitol Hill last week to embrace the Congress, declaring that Washington “works better” than many people think.

Granted, Clinton needs the Congress to enact his economic program; but will he stand up to them to keep his own promises on campaign reform? During the campaign, Clinton made campaign reform a priority, pledging he would have signed the reform bill that George Bush vetoed in the last Congress and that Democrats may now be unwilling to pass. To insist on campaign reform early in his term may cost Clinton with the Congress; to back down would not only disappoint many of his supporters, but could amount to an invitation to the nettlesome Ross Perot to return to the scene as the champion of a non-ideological outsiders’ movement.

Similar questions await Clinton from his women and gay supporters. Certainly, Friday was a better day for women than Thursday: Donna Shalala was appointed to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Carol Browner to run the Environmental Protection Agency and Laura D’Andrea Tyson to lead the Council of Economic Advisers. These appointments do help the Cabinet look more like America--and a woman attorney general would help even more. But for many feminists, securing the rights of all women to abortions is even more important. At least some Southern conservatives are saying privately that they would prefer not to be asked to vote on what they view as the troublesome issues of parental consent or 24-hour waiting periods, both of which would be prohibited prior to fetal viability in the current draft of the Freedom of Choice Act. Will Clinton, who little more than a year ago supported the requirement that minors secure their parents’ consent to abortion, be willing to use political capital to pass abortion-rights legislation, or will this, too, be put off?

As for the gay community, they may have scored a success in their opposition to Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, whose past hiring practices they have challenged--Nunn commented last week that no one had approached him to discuss any Cabinet jobs. But harder questions remain. Will the new President move forward to end discrimination in the military, even as thousands of young men and women, some of them no doubt gay, are on the ground in Somalia, or will he accede to the go-slow approach of Gen. Colin L. Powell, Nunn and others? Will he be willing to push for civil-rights legislation that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation? And will there be an openly gay man or lesbian in that Cabinet portrait of America?

Ironically, on these issues the improvement in the economy--at least outside of California--and the apparent responsiveness of the transition team to appeals by women, environmentalists and gays may make the President’s task harder rather than easier. The imperative that everything must await an economic package becomes harder to sell as the economy gets better; and those wielding clout for the first time in 12 years are not likely to give it up easily.

Clinton got elected by forging a coalition between liberals and moderates; between the insiders who are part of business-as-usual politics and outsiders who voted for congressional term limits in 14 states; between conservative Southern politicians and the feminists and gay activists they initially blamed for the ruin of the Democratic Party. What united this coalition was less the affirmative plan offered by Clinton than their common opposition to Bush.

In appointing a Cabinet, Clinton will likely hold his coalition together by offering enough to everyone that no one can complain of outright exclusion. But as he moves from appointments to governing, as the question shifts from who will do what to what they will actually do, real choices must be made that will inevitably disappoint some members of it. As of now, Clinton has left those choices for another day.