Clinton Back to Work After Yule Break

President-elect Bill Clinton went back to work Saturday after a day off for Christmas, taking time for an early morning run and a round of golf but then wading through “a mountain of paper that piled up while I was doing this Cabinet stuff.”

Over the last week, Clinton’s economic and domestic policy teams have presented him with a pile of options papers on issues ranging from steps he could take to balance the budget to proposals for reforms in the nation’s campaign finance laws.

Clinton plans to consider the options here and in Hilton Head, S.C., where he and his family will vacation this week, with an eye toward having final legislative proposals ready in time for his inauguration, now less than four weeks away.

In the meantime, however, there have been gifts to exchange and family members to greet.

“I had a great Christmas,” Clinton told well-wishers who gathered outside the governor’s mansion here Saturday morning to greet him.

On Thursday, Clinton took his daughter, Chelsea, on a last-minute round of shopping for presents after announcing his final Cabinet selections. He attended late-night church services Christmas Eve, then spent Christmas at home with the family, including Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, her husband, Richard, and Hillary Clinton’s parents, Hugh and Dorothy Rodham.

Also home for the holidays was the President-elect’s younger brother, Roger, a Los Angeles-based musician who showed up at the mansion in a newly purchased car. Police in Hot Springs, Ark., Clinton’s hometown and where Kelley still lives, stopped Roger Clinton on Wednesday for driving at 53 m.p.h in a 35-m.p.h. zone, but let him go with a warning. A police spokesman said that giving a warning was routine and that Roger Clinton had not received any special treatment.

Aides said the President-elect’s family ate an early Christmas dinner and Clinton spent part of the day watching the movie “Robin Hood” and the Aloha Bowl football game on television.

The President-elect got a new set of golf clubs from his wife, and gave both her and their daughter birthstone rings for Christmas, aides said. Roger Clinton gave his niece a set of Chinese checkers, the President-elect said Saturday, but the family ran into a problem when they tried to play.

“I lived for Chinese checkers when I was a kid,” Clinton told reporters after his Saturday morning jog. “But we couldn’t remember the rules.” Clinton asked reporters if sideways movements were allowed in the game.

The golf clubs appear to have worked out better. Clinton tried them out later in the day, playing with a cousin, Lisa Cornwell, and his brothers-in-law, Hugh and Tony Rodham. He told reporters a friend had given him a new golf bag to go with the clubs but that he can’t use it yet because “it has the presidential seal.”

Clinton also joked about the press pool that follows him whenever he appears in public.

A friend, he said, had asked him why the pool follows him when he jogs. He said he told the friend that the accompanying camera crew, photographers and reporters were watching to see if he “dropped dead.”

He also grumbled good-naturedly about the microphones that television and radio crews use to capture what he says. “The boom mike has done what 12 years of Reagan-Bush appointments to the Supreme Court couldn’t to abolish the right to privacy,” he said.