NEWS ANALYSIS : Capital’s Ways Force Clinton to Make Changes

As a bright spring day faded to dusk Thursday and President Clinton sat in the Oval Office, arguing with his former law school classmate, C. Lani Guinier, about her future, Hillary Rodham Clinton kept a stiff upper lip as she welcomed dinner guests upstairs on the Truman balcony.

Outwardly calm, she could not entirely repress her anxiety and frustration over the succession of failures engulfing the White House. “This is not a sprint. It’s a marathon,” she reminded one of her guests as they stood looking out over the South Lawn.

Nonetheless, as even the First Lady would admit, the first leg of the presidential marathon has not been kind to her husband and his advisers, who are once again laboring to find the right formula for governing.

Twenty weeks ago, Clinton and his team, filled with hope and excitement, poured through the gates of power and into the White House, convinced that their energy and ideas could conquer all.

Today, amid deep gloom and sour jokes about the “screw-up of the week,” the Clinton staff seems exhausted, bruised and bewildered over a series of reversals that have seen the President’s popularity plunge and his programs stall.

For a group that so recently seemed convinced that they knew all the answers, the reality of actually governing in Washington has come as something of a shock.

In the months since coming to office, Clinton and those closest to him have found that some issues, such as gays in the military, do not yield to the President’s skill at striking compromises.

They have found that the Senate’s peculiar rules give great power to small groups. They have found that party majorities mean little in a capital where most elected officials are independent operators with few loyalties beyond their own reelection.

Above all, they have found how much they need to find out.

“There is a steep learning curve here,” Hillary Clinton said.

Despite the way both the President and his wife have immersed themselves in the details of public policy issues for years, neither they nor their top aides seemed prepared for the difficulty of making policy change work in Washington.

“In Arkansas, he created his own agenda,” said Diane Blair, a political scientist and longtime friend of the Clintons. “In Washington, you have this tremendous overlay of constant analysis and critique” that can define as important many issues that a President would prefer to consider trivial, and vice versa.

In Washington, Clinton has also encountered a resistance to change that, for all his campaign rhetoric about gridlock, he seems to have consistently underestimated.

“There’s a great sense of frustration,” said a longtime Democratic strategist close to the White House. “This is a group of people that came to Washington to change it, and all they get is: ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do that, you have to do things this way.’ ”

The problems of adapting to Washington have worsened because of the President’s own character, attitudes and work habits--including his penchant for a decentralized, democratic management structure.

That management style, along with other Clinton characteristics, seems to have led to the lack of discipline and focus that top aides describe as the Administration’s most serious problem.

When he set up his White House structure in December, Clinton gave several prominent aides--Chief of Staff Thomas (Mack) McLarty, then-Communications Director George Stephanopoulos, economic policy chief Robert E. Rubin, Budget Director Leon E. Panetta, Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, personnel chief Bruce Lindsey, congressional liaison Howard Paster--and several Cabinet officials a strong voice on domestic policy. But no one aide truly seemed in charge.

That diffusion of power guaranteed, in theory, that Clinton would hear a wide variety of views on each issue before taking action. But the system has also accentuated Clinton’s own tendency to waver from one issue to the next, failing to maintain a consistent line of argument that will convince voters of the correctness of his position.

On economic policy, for example, the White House has drifted back and forth from emphasizing deficit reduction to emphasizing those elements of Clinton’s program that would spend new money to improve the economy.

The system has also allowed key matters to be fumbled away, as was the case in the Guinier nomination, where White House lawyers reviewed her writings and noted potential areas of controversy but where no senior officials ever confronted Clinton with questions about whether he was willing to defend his former classmate’s views.

Clinton accepted the problems of diffusing power because, as one adviser put it, “the Clintons do not like to delegate authority.”

Indeed, the initial structure of the White House resembles the initial structure of the Clinton campaign and the structure of Clinton’s first term as governor.

Longtime Clinton associates who have watched the past few weeks of White House fiascoes have noted the similarities with previous turns in Clinton’s life.

In all three cases--the first term as governor, the campaign and the White House--Clinton resisted empowering one person to act in his name. And in all three, that penchant has led to serious problems.

“It’s just like last spring,” said one former senior campaign adviser, remembering the low point of the Clinton presidential effort in late May and early June of 1992, when then-Gov. Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination, only to discover that his campaign had run completely out of gas.

At the time, Clinton’s campaign was run by an unwieldy set of advisers who communicated with each other in endless and ungovernable conference calls in which no one truly seemed in charge.

Everyone agreed that the system was hopeless, but Clinton seemed happy to stick with it.

In Arkansas, Clinton changed only after losing his job. In the campaign, it was the prospect of slipping into third place behind Ross Perot--and some prodding from Hillary Clinton--that forced the candidate to actually empower one adviser, in that case James Carville, to run the operation. The move, although belated, saved his candidacy.

Now, once again, Clinton appears to have accepted the fact that his system has not worked.

Over the next few days, the management structure is expected to change markedly as Clinton’s new counselor, David Gergen, settles into his job, as Stephanopoulos moves into his new role as Clinton’s personal adviser on policy and as McLarty completes a staff review and announces additional changes designed to bring more hierarchy to the White House operation.

In the past two cycles, Clinton’s belated willingness to change his management style and discipline his energies led to marked revivals of his political fortunes. As his battered staff summons strength for the next leg of their marathon, the question still to be answered is whether he can pull off the trick a third time.

Times Washington Bureau Chief Jack Nelson contributed to this story.

* CHRISTOPHER RESPONDS: Secretary of state seeks to rebut recent criticisms. A18