Clinton’s Presidential Honeymoon From Hell : Politics: It took Clinton far too long to name the bulk of his White House staff. The question about him remains: Will he ever get off the dime?

President-elect Bill Clinton might be forgiven for thinking he is trapped in the presidential honeymoon from hell. In the last few days, news stories have criticized his transition for indecisiveness, infighting, ethics lapses and backpedaling on campaign pledges. Even at his Thursday press conference announcing his White House staff, he didn’t get a single friendly question. Part of the criticism is just the usual press snippiness. Some of it, though, illuminates a weakness serious enough to torpedo the Administraton.

The first count against Clinton involves his promised middle-class tax cut. New deficit figures, he says, have forced him to think again about whether it is possible. Yet we know, because the press has told us, that the bad deficit news was available to Clinton during the campaign--and he kept on promising.

Clinton the campaigner also claimed that he, unlike President George Bush, had economic and health plans and the energy to carry them out. He said he would name most of his senior managers by inauguration time and get his proposals before the country within his much-mentioned “first 100 days.”

Well, none of this is going to happen. A week before the inauguration, Clinton was still holding preliminary meetings with his domestic policy advisers. His spokesmen were talking not of solid plans but of “hopes” and “goals,” and he had named fewer than a dozen sub-Cabinet officials. He named the bulk of his top-level White House staff just six days before taking office. Some of the hang-ups seemed to stem from Clinton’s search for “diversity,” while more delay was said to come from his propensity to “micromanage” (aagh! the ghost of Jimmy Carter past!) hiring decisions.

Clinton also talked during the campaign about driving the special interests from Washington and cutting the White House staff by 25%. But the 25% has disappeared over the rhetorical horizon. As for the special interests, the biggest and fattest of them paid $10,000 each to throw a party for Clinton’s incoming commerce secretary. When the opulent details became public, the entertainment had to be canceled.

What’s going on here is partly the operation of a reflexively adversarial press, and some criticism must be discounted. After all, major presidential transitions have been getting longer over the years. Fashioning concrete legislative plans is extremely slow going. Clinton’s anti-elitist campaign talk was probably taken seriously only by columnists and editorial writers.

But these answers are not quite enough. Even among modern transitions, this one is slow, unsure of direction and vulnerable to sniping from the outside.

During the last major transition, Ronald Reagan’s, there was certainly ideological jockeying. Campaign workers protested that the transition was making too many “non-political” appointments, and Reagan’s kitchen Cabinet fought the appointment of the allegedly liberal Frank C. Carlucci as deputy secretary of defense. But the diversity of the Clinton coalition is massive enough to make the Reagan folks look like the Rockettes.

This year, women and minorities exercise far more power than ever before. Foreign-policy jobs are claimed by Clintonites ranging from cold warriors to friends of Fidel. Domestically, there is a chasm between the “new Democrats” and those from what has come to be known as the “Hillary wing.” On the transition stage, we see utility executives and aggressive environmentalists, alternative-lifestyle advocates and the untouchably conventional.

The breadth of this spectrum reflects both our political fragmentation and the huge amount of finessing that a Democrat, in particular, has to do to win the presidency. It is hard for ordinary coalition-building to bridge all the divides.

But Clinton has approached the task in a way that has made it still harder. He has delayed in pursuit of the perfect choice, the most skillful balancing act, the least amount of offense.

This method reflects what a friend of Clinton’s once told me about him: If you were to penetrate all the layers and reach his political essence, you would find the soul of a classic Madisonian compromiser.

His method is also strangely typical of a certain part of the post-World War II baby-boom generation. These favored children were raised to believe in their superiority and specialness. As they came of age, they saw all the world’s possibilities before them; this was their happy moment of maximum potential. Afterward would come choices that would limit them: They would finally have to deliver on some of their great promise, and in the process they would show themselves a little less superior and special than they had seemed when all options were open.

Many who studied politics in college in the 1960s probably had their temperament reinforced by the work of influential presidential scholar Richard E. Neustadt, who argued that “keeping options open” was one of the primary necessities for a President hoping to maximize his power.

People with this type of experience can show a great reluctance to make final choices and admit that there are expectations they will not meet, wishes they cannot satisfy and people whose approval they cannot have.

In other words, they may display a systematic inability to get off the dime.

Each of our recent administrations has begun with a question whose answer would mean the difference between success and failure. With Jimmy Carter, it was the question of whether he could maintain the aura of moral superiority that had put him in the White House. With Reagan, it was the question of whether his people could lead a populist conservatism or whether they would drown their chance in minks and limos. With George Bush, it was the question of whether he could remain Reagan’s heir yet build himself a kinder, gentler image at the same time.

With Clinton, it is the question of whether he will be able to choose or whether he will so strenuously resist defining himself that he loses his ability to lead. We do not know the answer: Clinton has overcome weaknesses before and may well do so again. But knowing the question is a useful start.