The Season to Be Jolly Finds Capital Quiet, Bleak and Utterly Un-Merry : Republicans: As Little Rock bustles with activity of a new Administration taking shape, Washington is a near ghost town in politics and tourism.

In the White House Mess, counsel to the President C. Boyden Gray, his mien mournful in the best of times, sits alone at a table, a ghost-like, silent figure in no apparent hurry to finish his breakfast and head upstairs to his corner suite of offices.

Outside, a visitor arriving at 8 a.m. finds that no more than one in five of the assigned parking spaces on the heavily guarded street between the White House and the Old Executive Office Building is filled--a tell-tale sign that the usually hard-driving people who staff the White House have abandoned their habit of coming to work well before sun-up.

In most White House years, this is the time--the dark winter days between congressional sessions--when a new federal budget is kneaded into shape. But now, in the warren of suites assigned to the Office of Management and Budget, it well could be the mid-summer off-season.

The epidemic of quiet has spread even to the Capitol. Congress is gone: The old 102nd has finished; the 103rd has not yet arrived.

And in the White House, ground zero of American political life, government has virtually come to a halt. The power brokers of the past are out to lunch today.

A new Administration is taking shape, not here at the White House but in Little Rock, Ark., and in the minds of Democrats busily churning out position papers in think tanks that Republican policy-makers have ignored for 12 years.

Pockets of activity exist, of course. In the drab, concentric corridors of the Pentagon and in the State Department, for instance, there has been no diminution of activity, thanks to the tenuousness of life in Somalia, Yugoslavia and Russia.

And by all accounts, George Bush is plugging away as week by week his presidency nears its end. But don’t look much beyond the Oval Office to find that kind of activity.

The deployment of troops to Somalia, the possibility that he will yet be able to reach a new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, and a series of foreign policy and national security speeches he is delivering have kept the President focused on the day-to-day demands of his job. A stream of visitors seeking farewell Oval Office meetings has kept him focused on the ceremonial chores too.

On a dreary, wet evening last week, he left the White House to light the Christmas tree on the Ellipse just north of the Washington Monument. He has distributed medals, sat in the presidential box at the annual honors ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and on Wednesday, the one-time Yale University first baseman joked with the world champion Toronto Blue Jays baseball team, which was visiting the White House complex, that he was “a rookie ballplayer who needs a job.”

Night after night last week and this, he has been the smiling host at one White House Christmas party after another--seven of them, all told, with as many as 600 guests at each.

“There’s this notion that he was detached,” said one White House official, scornful of reports that the President had divorced himself from the job. “I wouldn’t overemphasize that.”

Bush’s daily schedule is busy enough that one longtime aide has suggested to old friends who want to visit the President at the White House that they wait until his formal retirement begins. Mindful of a story an aide to Gerald R. Ford once told of the former President finding few people interested in visiting him once he left office, the aide is suggesting that would-be visitors pay some attention to Bush six months hence.

But the daily business of the ceremonial presidency and the drone of activity at the Pentagon and State Department are the exceptions.

The torpor of the town has even engulfed tourist Washington.

One recent afternoon, the parking lot at Arlington Memorial Cemetery was as quiet as the nearby hillsides. A visitor counted one tour bus and nine cars. On the streets near the Mall, prime turf for visitors to the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, parking was readily available.

There were no lines to board the elevator to the top of the Washington Monument. On a busy day the queue would wrap twice around the monument’s base.

Only the White House continued to attract tourists--drawn, perhaps, by the twinkling holiday decorations spread throughout the State Floor.

In the West Wing, where the Oval Office sits, the hushed, carpeted corridors are even quieter than usual. “The ratio of work-time to schmooze-time has reversed dramatically,” said one senior White House staff member.

Two members of the hard-driving team assembled by Chief of Staff James A. Baker III spent last Friday morning playing racquetball and did not arrive in their offices until 11 a.m.

And one senior aide to Vice President Dan Quayle acknowledged that it was so quiet in his office on Monday that he headed home at 2:30 p.m. to rake the oak leaves that had piled up on his suburban lawn.

Appointments are arranged around job interviews, which, for some, have not been going well. Experience in the Bush campaign, it seems, is not in and of itself much of a selling point.

“You worked in communications for those people and you want us to hire you on the basis of that? “ one slightly incredulous interviewer asked a job-seeker from the White House communications staff, according to the unhappy word filtering around the West Wing.

Baker himself has been scheduling appointments with would-be ghostwriters to assist him in preparing his memoirs. His deputy chief of staff, Robert Zoellick, is the point man for White House contacts with the incoming Clinton staff--and he continues to wait for them to show up.

Times staff writers Doyle McManus and John M. Broder contributed to this story.