Clinton Close to Naming Attorney General : Cabinet: Three women are said to be the main candidates. Officials say an announcement could come as soon as today.

President Clinton moved closer once again Wednesday to naming an attorney general--with officials saying that an announcement could come as early as today. Speculation centered on Florida prosecutor Janet Reno.

White House aides, stung by the leak last week that Judge Kimba M. Wood had become the front-runner for the attorney general’s job, were cautious in discussing the process. They said that Clinton, who interviewed Reno for about 90 minutes Tuesday night, has discussed the job with other candidates as well and might pick someone other than Reno.

Wednesday afternoon, Sen. J. James Exon (D-Neb.) released a statement pushing the candidacy of Nebraska Court of Appeals Judge Lindsey Miller-Lerman, who--among other qualifications--attended Wellesley College with Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 1960s.

Other sources touted Linda Fairstein, chief of the sex crimes unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, who met with White House officials Wednesday. Fairstein prosecuted a number of high-profile New York cases, including the so-called Central Park jogger rape case.

Aides widely agree that Clinton would like to put an end to what has become a long and embarrassing saga for the Administration, one that has both Clinton advisers and outside observers wondering just why it has proved so difficult for the President to fill the post.

The answer, according to White House aides and others close to the process, involves both bad luck and a fundamental truth about Clinton’s Administration--it contains a lot of lawyers.

Just as a group of professional cooks might have trouble agreeing on the nation’s top chef, the lawyer-heavy Clinton Administration has had difficulty reaching a consensus on what qualities to seek in the government’s top attorney.

“There are a lot of lawyers here and they all have different ideas” about what background an attorney general should have, said one White House aide. In addition to the President and Mrs. Clinton, the list of lawyers involved in the process includes White House personnel director Bruce Lindsey; his deputy, John Emerson; White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and outside advisers to the Clintons, such as New York attorney Susan Thomases.

Clinton has tried to find a candidate with strong management skills, a high-profile legal career, a strong reputation for legal intelligence and a background that includes at least some work for public-interest or nonprofit groups. Trying to find someone who meets all those criteria has ruled out many potential candidates, the White House aide said.

In addition, Clinton criticized the George Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations for permitting the Justice Department to become too political, and he has tried to avoid appointing a political crony or old friend as attorney general.

That decision ruled out the sort of selection that John F. Kennedy made when he chose his brother, Robert, to head the Justice Department, or that Richard M. Nixon made in picking campaign manager John N. Mitchell, that Jimmy Carter made in choosing Griffin B. Bell, or that Reagan made in selecting William French Smith.

Avoiding candidates who might be considered cronies has led Clinton to look mostly at candidates he did not know well, opening the way for surprises--such as the hiring of illegal immigrants--that upended the Zoe Baird nomination and forestalled the choice of Wood. Clinton recently interviewed a past political ally, Gerald Baliles, a former governor and attorney general of Virginia, but appears unlikely to tap him for the post.

In addition, a senior Senate aide said, Clinton set a difficult task for himself in seeking a Democratic woman for attorney general with high-level experience in government. Women only began moving into the senior levels of the legal profession in large numbers in the last 15 years. And during most of that time, the White House--and therefore senior government appointments--were controlled by Republicans.

Clinton did turn early on to a woman who had received a senior appointment under Carter, federal Appeals Judge Patricia M. Wald. But the 64-year-old Wald turned down the job, in part because of considerations connected to her age, sources close to her have said.

Complicating matters further, the Senate aide said, Clinton has tried to find a candidate who is willing to sign off on his position in support of the death penalty, a position that effectively has ruled out some potential female candidates. Two weeks ago, Clinton interviewed Judge Rya Zobel, a federal district judge in Boston, but Zobel’s opposition to the death penalty made her appointment unlikely, sources familiar with the process said.

Clinton Communications Director George Stephanopoulos said after the Zobel interview that Clinton did not consider support for the death penalty a litmus-test issue in picking an attorney general. But Clinton gave considerable emphasis during his presidential campaign to his support for the death penalty, using it as one of the indicators that he is a “different kind of Democrat” who departed from liberal orthodoxies. Picking an attorney general strongly opposed to capital punishment might therefore pose a political problem.

Conservative Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have made clear their opposition to a candidate who differed with Clinton on the issue.

That opposition was intensified by the fact that many of the candidates for the job lacked experience with criminal law and law enforcement--a problem in the eyes of Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and some other members of the panel.