Business Elite Seek Access to President-Elect : Transition: Leaders seem content to serve largely as props in exchange for a chance to become a Friend of Bill.

This definitely is not Bill Clinton’s regular “buscapade” crowd.

At the Little Rock Airport, 51 corporate jets line the runway. Business is booming at the city’s largest limousine service. Pin-stripes and wingtips are everywhere.

As Clinton’s two-day economic conference unfolded Monday inside the Robinson Convention Center here, America’s business elite and the President-elect were formally introduced.

Officially, Clinton summoned the 329 business, labor and academic leaders to Arkansas to participate in a highly unusual and surprisingly substantive tutorial on America’s long-term economic woes.

But for many, the real purpose for the trip to Little Rock, Ark., was to stake out their rightful place in the court of Clinton.

For these exemplars of American business, the meetings offer a chance to network with the man who has refined networking to a high art form. They could only hope that it still is not too late to become a genuine FOB (Friend of Bill).

“I would guess there is a lot of that, wouldn’t you?” mused conference participant Hugh McColl, chief executive of Nations Bank, one of the largest banking operations in the country based in Charlotte, N.C.

Corporate and labor titans unaccustomed to sharing the limelight seemed perfectly willing to serve largely as props for Clinton’s call-in television extravaganza, in return for proximity to the new center of power.

And the last thing they want to do is rock the boat: These corporate chiefs did not fly all the way to Arkansas to pick a public fight with the President-elect.

So even though Clinton included a number of Republican executives for the sake of diversity, no one rose to challenge the basic economic assumption guiding Monday’s discussion: that the Clinton Administration will need to find ways to redress the problems inflicted on the economy by 12 years of Republican rule.

Robert M. Solow, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, laid out the premise at the start: “We wouldn’t be sitting here today if most American voters didn’t feel in their bones that something was very wrong with the economy and that the people in charge either weren’t aware or didn’t care or didn’t know what to do in any case.”

But no one in the room--not even the business leaders who once stoutly supported former President Ronald Reagan--flinched.

“I think you see a lot of people singing from the same song sheet today,” noted John White, who served as economic adviser to independent presidential candidate Ross Perot but later endorsed Clinton.

The message broadcast to the nationwide television audience was clear: Democrat Clinton was reaching out, not only to corporate executives, but also to the average citizens who were able to call in and tell the President-elect their emotional stories of economic plight.

When Ken Hunt, a laid-off toolmaker at an Orange County defense plant, called in to describe in personal terms the wrenching changes facing the aerospace industry, it seemed as if Clinton had bridged the economic gap between the corporate boardroom and the employee lunchroom.

“Does anybody . . . want to say anything to this man?” Clinton asked of the summit’s participants.

But it didn’t seem to matter to the CEOs that they were serving in part as theatrical scenery in a political event. Nor did they seem to care that they had spent much of the day sitting and listening from the back of the room.

These leaders had won the hottest tickets in the country, beating out thousands of other would-be participants. Clinton had repeatedly expanded the list of participants to accommodate additional businessmen.

And what better way for media-savvy corporate executives to gain visibility? It certainly did not hurt John Scully of Apple Computer, an early Clinton backer who walked around Little Rock on Monday with a public relations aide in tow, when Clinton publicly thanked him for sending a team of Apple experts to develop the graphics used for the sessions.

For a lucky few, audiences with key decision-makers in the fledgling Clinton Administration will be possible here this week. All of Clinton’s newly named appointees for senior economic policy posts sat in on the summit and apparently were available for private meetings with key participants. Owen Bieber, president of the powerful United Auto Workers, noted that he and a few other labor leaders invited to the summit had breakfast Monday with Robert B. Reich, Clinton’s newly named secretary of labor.

Of course, for many of the summit participants, such as Scully, Clinton is no stranger. While his campaign was laced with populist rhetoric and highlighted by bus trips through the heartland, Clinton has always been careful to stress that he is a pro-growth Democrat who wants to work with business, not against it. And he has already made clear, through his initial appointments to his economic team, that he intends to approach change gradually and cautiously.

For much of the day, Clinton kept the conference focused on the larger issues facing the nation--the deficit, lagging productivity and the health care crisis. In fact, the morning session, opened by Solow, a Nobel laureate, resembled nothing so much as a graduate school economic seminar and seemed designed to give the public a glimpse at the theories behind Clinton’s public policy prescriptions.

But when they got a turn at the microphone, it was hard for many of the business leaders not to take advantage of their brief moment with the nation’s new leader to plead their special cases.

Phil Grieve of Eco Lab, Inc., of St. Paul, Minn., asked Clinton to streamline regulations affecting his high-tech firm. Jill Barad of toy-maker Mattel in El Segundo urged Clinton not to cancel “most favored nation” trade status for China, because so many U.S. toy companies have factories there.

Again and again, Clinton showcased his breadth of knowledge of the issues; the session let his policy-wonk side run riot.

“My strong preference is for market incentives over regulations,” Clinton told Grieve.