Cabinet Choices to Get Soft Sell in Senate Panels

Despite talk of a waiting Republican ambush, the Clinton transition team has been preparing Cabinet nominees for the Senate confirmation hearings this week with a strategy that assumes sweet talk will be more important than any elaborate self-defense.

One sign of this emphasis is the makeup of the Clinton team’s confirmation staff. The unit is led by veteran congressional hands rather than attorneys with experience in handling sensitive nominations.

Also telling is one of the staff’s first actions: the unusual move of taking nominees on courtesy calls to Republican as well as Democratic senators.

Both reflect the conviction of President-elect Bill Clinton’s team that while the Republicans may succeed in embarrassing some of his picks, the nominations are essentially in the bag. The most important task of the moment, they believe, is to forge relationships with senators that will be badly needed when Clinton tries to enact his legislative agenda.

“We’re assuming there will be some of the fireworks people have been talking about,” said one senior transition aide, referring to Republicans’ vows to closely scrutinize the personal as well as public lives of Clinton’s picks. “But we’re not assuming this is going to be warfare.”

Whether this view reflects undue confidence may be known as soon as Wednesday, when the hearings begin with consideration of Commerce Secretary-designate Ronald H. Brown. Brown, a lobbyist-attorney and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is widely expected to be the most controversial nominee and to be questioned closely on his lobbying for Japanese electronic companies and his private business deals, including his relationship with a waste disposal firm in New York.

Also to come before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee this week is Federico Pena, the transportation secretary-designate, who is to appear Thursday. Robert B. Reich, Clinton’s longtime friend and labor secretary-designee, is due Thursday before the Labor and Human Resources Committee, while Jesse Brown, veterans affairs-designee, is set to appear Friday before the Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), the defense secretary-designate, is tentatively scheduled to be questioned Thursday by the Armed Services Committee.

After the panels vote, the nominees must be approved by the full Senate. Expectations are that the Cabinet secretaries will be confirmed by the Jan. 20 inauguration.

Lawyers have been assigned to each nominee, and they have been questioned intensely on any area that might prove an embarrassment. “We’ve asked every question that might be asked, and then some,” said a transition aide.

The nominees are also receiving exhaustive briefing books prepared by the transition staff intended to give them a working knowledge of their agency’s activities.

Preparing the nominees is a staff led by Howard Paster, who is Washington head of the Hill & Knowlton public relations firm and a former Clinton campaign adviser and ex-congressional aide. Other senior aides include Susan Brophy, head of congressional relations for the transition and a former administrative aide to Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.); Kay L. Casstevens, who is chief of staff for Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), and Laura Quinn, an aide to Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.).

Meanwhile, Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican point man on the nominations, has been building a network of congressional staffers and others to look for information about the nominees’ policy views, business dealings or personal habits. While many other Senate staff members were taking time off during the Christmas and New Year’s vacations, some committee aides continued to burrow away at the task.

One Republican aide said the scrutiny of Ronald Brown would include a look for documents that would show whether, in representing Japanese electronics companies in the late 1980s, Brown took positions that ran counter to U.S. policy. Also to be probed is whether Brown was personally enriched in any improper way for his activities as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the aide said.

The Republicans’ scrutiny may head in a dozen different directions. They are expected to probe the lobbying activities of several other nominees, including Mickey Kantor, the Los Angeles attorney who is Clinton’s pick for U.S. trade representative; Interior Secretary-designate Bruce Babbitt, who has battled agriculture interests as president of the League of Conservation Voters, and Jesse Brown, who as head of the Disabled Veterans of America has advocated more public spending for vets.

“It’s safe to say they’ll all be asked about their lobbying activities,” said an aide to Lott.

One GOP strategist said the Republicans’ lingering bitterness over the Democrats’ treatment of Sen. John Tower during Tower’s failed 1989 nomination for defense secretary might lead them to bring up personal habits of some nominees, even if the events go back years.

Allegations about personal behavior can, of course, reflect badly on an accuser. But the Republicans might use a witness to bring out testimony on how former San Antonio Mayor Henry G. Cisneros, the housing secretary-designee, dropped plans to run for reelection in 1989 after publicity about his romantic entanglement with a political fund-raiser. Cisneros, who later acknowledged the affair, said at the time that a child’s health problem kept him from running.

“John Tower’s drinking was brought up by a witness,” said the strategist. “The Republicans might use a witness here.”

But many outside observers see little likelihood that questions from the Republican minority will develop into any serious challenge. Although some anti-nuclear advocates have written letters of complaint about the nomination of Energy Secretary-designate Hazel O’Leary, an executive of Northern States Power, there is so far little public sign of the kind of interest-group pressure that often presages the fall of a nominee.

“These nominations will sail through,” predicted Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington watchdog group.

“I just don’t see that kind of combustible material here,” said Stephen Hess, a political analyst at Brookings Institution.

Some of the nominees clearly are not experts in all of their agencies’ activities, Hess said. Zoe Baird, for example, the attorney general designate, does not have an extensive background in criminal law.

In Hess’ view, Clinton’s most controversial nominee may be Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the Arkansas pediatrician chosen to be the next surgeon general. Her staunch advocacy of abortion rights has stirred opposition from anti-abortion groups. She is not expected to replace the current surgeon-general, Dr. Antonia Coello Novello, until next spring.

Despite the truculent noises from the Republicans, Cabinet selections are rarely defeated. And nominees of a first-term Administration that also controls the Senate have an even easier time.

Succeeding a Democratic Administration in 1980, Ronald Reagan won confirmation for all of his nominees, despite environmentalists’ vocal opposition to Interior Secretary James G. Watt. Only 12 senators voted against Watt.

Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan, who later battled allegations of mob ties, also was approved without difficulty.

This year the pressure for Republicans to go along with Clinton is strong for other reasons. They may be seen as a cause of congressional gridlock, and an obstacle to a President whose election has already raised public confidence in the future.