Reflections of 3 Bush Advisers : Transition: Members of the outgoing economic team look back at their performance.

To its legion of critics, the Bush Administration economic team has always been something of an oxymoron: It never did much about the economy, and it certainly never acted like a team. Now, as the Administration’s economic advisers pack up to make way for Bill Clinton’s replacements, conservatives are accusing them of engineering George Bush’s defeat by bungling key policy decisions and sometimes putting their own agendas above the President’s.

Yet as outgoing Budget Director Richard G. Darman, Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady and White House chief economic adviser Michael J. Boskin say their goodbyes, they are trying to put a more positive spin on their four years of power. Publicly, at least.

Privately, they admit that they still carry the scars of battle they sometimes inflicted upon one another. Bad blood persists, especially between Darman and Brady; the budget director has probably earned the enmity of the Treasury boss and his staff for so often undermining Brady’s initiatives.

But Darman, Brady and Boskin also recognize that the Bush years were filled with missed opportunities on economic and domestic policy--missed in part because of apathy or internal strife in the White House as well as partisan opposition on Capitol Hill. Ultimately, it was the performance of the economy on their watch that doomed Bush’s presidency.

Yet as they sift through the rubble of Bush’s defeat and watch as a major policy shift takes shape in Washington, they remain hopeful that history will judge them more kindly than did the voters of 1992.

For Brady, roundly derided as ineffectual by Republicans and Democrats alike, there is a sense of confidence that his accomplishments will stand the test of time better than that of many of his Administration colleagues.

“There are four or five mileposts that are flags in the ground that will endure,” Brady said in an interview.

They include dealing quickly with the savings and loan crisis soon after Bush took office, limiting the damage from the Salomon Bros. securities trading scandal and helping to heal the Third World debt crisis that once threatened the global financial system.

“I think, a year from now, people will look back and say, ‘Treasury did pretty well,’ ” Brady said.

Boskin, meanwhile, used Bush’s final Economic Report of the President to defend the policies of the Reagan-Bush era and to argue that “revisionists” who seek to blame the nation’s economic ills on the policies of the last 12 years are flat wrong.

The gathering recovery should make that plain, Boskin told reporters. “A self-sustaining recovery, consistent with low inflation, is finally underway,” he said.

And while the Bush Administration’s earlier predictions that a recovery was just around the corner may have been impolitic during the campaign, they have proved quite accurate, Boskin said.

Darman, easily the most controversial figure in the group, has perhaps the most difficult case to make for the success of his tenure.

The government added about $1 trillion in new debt during Bush’s term, running record deficits year after year.

Darman himself became reviled within the Administration as a man who quashed bold initiatives and engaged in endless rounds of backbiting to further his own ends.

In a final press briefing with reporters, Darman argued that his crowning achievement--the 1990 budget agreement--will stand as a landmark effort to curb budgetary excesses. Never mind that the pact caused Bush to break his no-new-taxes pledge, or that conservatives consider it the final abandonment of Reaganomics.

“The budget agreement itself obviously was very unpopular, and especially unpopular within the Republican Party,” Darman said. “It is unquestionably something that I pushed for and deserve a fair amount of the credit or blame for. I deserve a very large amount, very large amount of the credit or the blame. I don’t want to re-fight the argument about the merits, but I do have a very significant difference with some people about the merits.”

For all three men, the sunset of the Bush presidency has offered one last chance to look back at what might have been.

For Brady, there is lingering bitterness that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan didn’t move more aggressively to pump up the economy in time to help Bush during the campaign.

Brady sought to extract a commitment from Greenspan for faster growth in return for his reappointment as Fed chairman in the summer of 1991, and he believes that Greenspan didn’t uphold his end of the bargain.

For Boskin, there is regret that the White House didn’t push for a tax and budget package in 1991 that would have provided a short-term fiscal stimulus to get the economy back on its feet in time for the 1992 election. But, he added quickly, it took “courage” for President Bush to take a longer view and to patiently allow the economy to run its course.

And for Darman, there is regret that the Bush Administration never was able to get a handle on the growth of mandatory “entitlement” programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

His long-sought goal of placing a cap on mandatory spending, which he believes is crucial to deficit reduction, remains only a goal.

Now, Darman said he believes that President-elect Clinton will be forced to pursue the same objective, despite the fierce political opposition it is certain to generate among beneficiaries who fear their benefits will be reduced.

“If you declare as a society that the entire middle-class and wealthy mandatory program structure is out of bounds . . . (you) will have a built-in problem because these programs are not subject to any discipline or restraint,” Darman said.

A Tale of Two Economies

As president-elect Bill Clinton takes office this week, he will take over an economy whose results have been decidedly mixed in the last four years. Interest rates and inflation have gone down since President Bush took office, but unemployment and the federal debt are up.

Inflation (December) 1988: 4.4% 1992: 2.9%

Gross Federal Debt (in billions) 1988: 2,600.8 1992: 4,002.7

Unemployment Rate (December) 1988: 5.2% 1992: 7.3%

Gross Domestic Product (annual growth) 1988: 3.3% 1992: 2.6%

Dow Jones Industrial Average 1988: 2,226.07 1992: 3,271.12

Yield on 30-Year Treasury Bonds (Lehman Bros. T-Bond index) 1988: 8.89% 1992: 7.37%

Source: Bureau of Labor Statisticsm Commerce Department, Dow Jones