COLUMN ONE : Outsider Navigates the Beltway : Laura Tyson draws cheers, jeers by saying what’s on her mind. Clinton’s economic council chief is a political novice, more scholar than schemer. She still gets people to pay attention.

The White House driver steers a clunky, blue Chrysler into the hotel driveway and looks around for his Very Important Passenger. Three people hop in the car.

“Which one is Dr. Tyson?” he asks two guys in suits and ties--barely glancing at the soft-spoken woman in a salmon-colored blazer and black skirt.

Oops.

Laura D’Andrea Tyson--scholarly maverick and, if such a thing exists in Washington, unpretentious soul--does not say a word. “If you asked him to do a probability estimate of who was the doctor in the car, on the odds alone, it wouldn’t have been me,” she explains later.

If that sounds like an unusual mind at work, that’s because it is. Tyson, 46, heads the White House Council of Economic Advisers, a post that gives her Cabinet rank. It also offers her a chance to enact ideas that have drawn kudos and jeers during an academic career that has challenged economic orthodoxy.

Some White House watchers have applauded her “feistiness,” while others label her politically naive. Her influence remains a work in progress; her activist philosophy a source of concern among conservatives.

More scholar than schemer, a woman who has defied the gospel in a male-dominated profession--and thrived--Tyson’s bumpy Odyssey is among the more surprising human tales of the Clinton Administration.

“I just try to make the economic arguments,” she said in an interview. “Sometimes that’s what people want to hear. Sometimes it’s not even on the agenda.”

Jobs. Taxes. The deficit. The sorts of things that presidents lose sleep over, issues that have seriously eroded Clinton’s standing with the public. Tyson’s job is to offer wisdom--”economic logic” she calls it--on all of them.

That’s about it. The Council of Economic Advisers doesn’t run anything. Its power depends on what the President thinks of who’s in charge; its prestige rises and falls with different administrations.

And always there is this colossal creature called the U.S. economy, which may defy the most high-minded bids to influence it.

But for someone who never met the President until late in the campaign, Tyson has gotten off to a good start. The brainy, onetime high school cheerleader hit a chord with Clinton when she argued, contrary to many of her peers, that government should help key technologies, and that public investment--read ‘government spending’--could enhance the economy.

Tyson has emerged as a leading spokeswoman on the economy, offering reporters the White House “take” on the latest statistics, while working behind-the-scenes on the Clinton budget plan that is headed for a showdown in Congress.

On-the-job training, however, has meant learning to live with powerful White House rivals, a dubious Congress and jealous critics.

In one early mission to Capitol Hill, lawmakers peppered the economist with questions about Clinton’s emphasis on tax hikes to cut the deficit. They were posturing for the public, uninterested in real debate.

The politically inexperienced Tyson thought she might change a few minds.

“She was acting like a helpful professor to a naive student,” one attendee at the hearing recalled. “These guys weren’t at all naive. They knew exactly what they were doing.”

Life outside the ivory tower has produced more enjoyable moments, like when Elliot, her 10-year-old, plunked himself down in Clinton’s desk chair for a photo--and got a high-five from the commander-in-chief.

Tyson gratefully points out her “tremendous opportunity” to try and transform academic ideas into real-world policies.

But her new life has perils, as well, ranging from personal hobgoblins (flying in thunderstorms) to jumpy financial markets to face-offs with snide congressmen.

In order to attend Clinton’s economic summit in Little Rock last year, Tyson had to break her own rule and fly through choppy weather between California and Arkansas.

“I got on and off the plane several times before I allowed myself to do it,” she said.

A recent remark by Tyson on the difficulty of finding further budget cuts--a quote she says was misconstrued by a news service--dampened a bond rally. More basically, she has taken her lumps in the helter-skelter of political debate, as White House advisers typically do sooner or later.

Tyson’s view that deficit reduction shouldn’t proceed too rapidly, because the painful process could jeopardize the recovery, has slipped from favor. Instead, Clinton is following the advice of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and others who counsel that attacking the deficit is the wisest course, both politically and economically.

Tyson backed Clinton’s spending stimulus and BTU energy tax, proposals that were mauled by Congress. She has cautioned that health care reform could endanger the economy if a massive package is imposed too fast, a view said to put her on the opposite side of the table from Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“On a number of occasions I’ve been in meetings where Laura said things that others thought but were unwilling to say,” observed Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, a longtime friend and occasional combatant. “Some would call that political naivete. I’d call it courage.”

Whatever you call it, Tyson has long taken an individual path.

In 1982, she helped launch the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, a nerve center for revised thinking about U.S. policies for an increasingly competitive world.

Through the scholarly debate, she became friends with Reich, then a Harvard lecturer interested in similar questions. Their two families even vacationed at Reich’s Cape Cod bungalow when Tyson taught at Harvard in 1989 as a visiting professor.

Last year, as the Clinton campaign searched for female policy makers, Reich thought of his old friend. In August, he got her invited to the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, where a group of economists was tossing ideas about with the Democratic candidate.

By all accounts, Tyson sparkled at the forum, conveying her views lucidly and without the self-importance that sometimes creeps into professors’ speech. Her conviction that U.S. manufacturing jobs could be rescued given the right policy formula was just what Clinton wanted to hear.

“That was clearly the meeting where she outshined the other folks,” recalled Derek Shearer, a Clinton associate and professor at Occidental College. “She explained things in a clear and forceful way--in English.”

Tyson kept in touch with the campaign but was preoccupied with her family’s impending move to Cambridge, Mass., where Harvard had offered her a permanent job.

Then, “after the election, Bob Reich called and said, ‘I want to borrow your wife. Is it OK?’ ” recalled her husband, Erik Tarloff, a screenwriter.

“It may have been a mistake, but I said, ‘Of course.’ ”

Next stop: Little Rock. Warren Christopher, who was directing the presidential transition, advised Tyson not to leave town--but left out the fact that she was in line for the chairmanship of the economic council, the plum of her profession.

“The President assumed that I knew why I was there,” she said of the fateful interview last fall in which Tyson realized she would become the first woman to head the council.

She got used to the idea faster than some of her colleagues. Indeed, her selection sparked a minor furor in the usually sedate economics world.

Tyson’s credentials and interests (her Ph.D. dissertation was on inflation in Yugoslavia) were called into question, mostly in off-the-record whispers by prominent Ivy League scholars.

The outcry was fueled in part by a hunger for power among Democratic policy wonks who had been marooned in the academic wilderness for 12 years of Republican rule. Some complained that Tyson wasn’t a big-picture “macro” economist.

Others took shots at her talents, and the worth of the council itself: It’s “a waste of time to have the profession’s best and brightest in this position,” wrote Robert J. Barro, a Harvard economist, in the Wall Street Journal. “In this sense, Mr. Clinton’s selection of Ms. Tyson is just fine.”

“I was hurt by what they said,” Tyson said of some of the criticisms from people she thought were her friends, such as Paul Krugman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But I also saw the pain underlying what they said.”

In any case, there wasn’t much time to worry about it. On a given 12-hour day, Tyson might meet with other Cabinet officers, testify before Congress, prepare an economic analysis, field media calls or perform an Administration chore, such as greeting student leaders visiting the capital.

Oval Office meetings may be announced with little warning. Clinton also consults Tyson by note and in other ways, such as when he sent her an Atlantic Monthly article on global trade issues, with questions scribbled on every page.

“When do you find time to read this stuff?” she wrote back in a memo.

While Tyson has been adapting to the intensely political, male-dominated culture, she has remained apart in at least one way: She doesn’t always conceal her human side.

After a confident presentation to manufacturers, she acknowledged that public appearances sometimes give her the butterflies and she has a tendency to get “a little obsessive” beforehand.

An even more personal issue, she said, is the conflict of being a working mother. One day recently, she had to back out of plans to see a Shakespeare play with her family, because of a night meeting.

“They’re probably going to have pizza and come here and watch TV while I’m at the meeting,” said Tyson, who lives with her husband and son in Northwest Washington.

Choosing between “Much Ado About Nothing” and the global economy is one of the easier conflicts Tyson has confronted.

As a Smith College student in the late 1960s, Tyson was drawn both to psychology and economics. Economics won out, in part because it appealed to her “do-good” side: For all its statistical abstractions, she believed economics might hold lessons that could help the poor and lead to a more prosperous society.

A quarter century later, she still is remembered on the New England campus as a smart, even precocious student.

“It was almost like talking with a colleague,” said Robert T. Averitt, an economics professor. “You don’t forget students like that.”

At Berkeley, early in her teaching career, Tyson was drawn to studies about how U.S. industries fare in the global economy. That might sound innocent enough, but in academic circles the path was risky: Tyson’s colleagues at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy weren’t even in the economics department.

“We got pounded” for unconventional views, recalled John Zysman, a political scientist and longtime colleague.

Yet if some academics sniffed at the roundtable’s approach, events were creating a vastly broader audience for the research.

Anxieties about an American decline were spreading, and policy-makers wrestled with new questions: Should the U.S. government pick specific industries for help? If so, which ones? What circumstances justify government meddling in the free market?

These were questions Tyson had staked her career on. She concluded that it makes sense for the government to deem a few, select technologies such as semiconductors as especially important for long-term national security and prosperity--and to cultivate them.

“These industries tend to support a large number of highly skilled, high-wage jobs, and they’re being targeted” by America’s competitors, she said. “There’s a competition around the world for these high-wage jobs.”

She would help U.S. manufacturers, as well, by subsidizing key technologies and selectively retaliating against countries that block U.S. imports.

In orthodox economic circles, these ideas spark a reaction akin to a lighted match landing in a pool of gasoline. When it comes to the economy, goes the gospel, bureaucrats invariably mess things up.

Similarly, it is an article of faith among traditional economists that open trade is a key to global prosperity, and the United States has done the world a service by promoting it.

“Tyson would overturn the basic premises of our postwar trading policies,” contends Jagdish Bhagwati, a onetime mentor-turned-critic, in the New Republic. “And her arguments fail to persuade.”

At this early point, Tyson’s success at persuading Clinton to back her views isn’t fully established.

Unlike past council leaders, she has had to contend with a new office, the National Economic Council, whose chairman Robert Rubin enjoys greater access to the President than she does. To her dismay, Tyson was left out of an April meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, a meeting for which she had done a lot of groundwork--and which Rubin and Bentsen attended.

Still, the howls that were prompted by her selection for the adviser post seem increasingly silly.

While Tyson continues to argue for a tough trade stance, there is little sign of a radical shift in U.S. policy. Her impact is more likely to be measured in subtle shifts of rhetoric and regulation than in dramatic overhauls.

“As far as I can tell, she’s pragmatic about it,” observed Charles Schultze, chief economist in the Carter Administration.

Also, contrary to predictions, Tyson has recruited highly respected colleagues to serve on her council, Alan S. Blinder of Princeton and Joseph E. Stiglitz of Stanford.

Nor has the council become a backwater. Tyson often sits in when the White House mulls economic strategy. (Her predecessor, Michael J. Boskin, once threatened to quit unless he was granted a meeting with President Bush.)

Already, Administration rhetoric on “results-oriented trade,” pressuring partners to buy more U.S. imports, bears the stamp of Tyson’s thinking.

In a recent New York Times Magazine article, columnist William Safire said Tyson added “intellectual depth and telegenic feistiness to the economic group” and ranked her clout above several Cabinet colleagues.

Such breezy reckonings of who’s in and who’s out are among Tyson’s least favorite things about Washington. But for all the personal disruption, political whirlwinds and fickle media, easygoing Laura Tyson is not complaining: “So far,” she said, “it’s actually been quite a pleasant experience.”

Profile: Laura D’Andrea Tyson

Background on Laura D’Andrea Tyson, head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers:

* Age: 46

* Born: Bayonne, N.J.

* Education: B.A. degree in economics from Smith College in 1969; Ph.D. degree in economics in 1974 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

* Career: Tyson taught economics at Princeton University from 1974 to 1977 before joining the economics and business administration faculty at UC Berkeley in 1978. Her work has focused on America’s role in the global economy and issues of trade and technology. She helped launch the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy in 1982 and has served on various study commissions. Her book, “Who’s Bashing Whom,” argues for a stronger government role in aiding key technologies.

* Family: Married, one son.