Gergen Has Some Do’s and Don’ts for Clinton

David Gergen, who has filled the awkward role of house Republican in the Clinton Administration, on Tuesday urged President Clinton to focus more, speak less and hire some experienced aides.

Gergen, who leaves at the end of the month to become a visiting professor at Duke University, ended his sometimes-rocky 18-month adventure in the Clinton inner circle with a load of Polonius-like counsel for the young President:

* Clinton should resist the notion that “more communication is better communication” and limit his public appearances to those in which he has something meaningful to say.

* Clinton should concentrate on two or three domestic policy initiatives and two or three foreign policy problems and not get so distracted by the daily static of public life.

* Clinton should bring his Cabinet members out of the White House shadow and use their talents and voices to better articulate the Administration’s vision.

* Clinton should widen his circle of advisers to include more White House veterans, more Democratic elder statesmen, and, yes, more moderate Republicans like Gergen.

* And Clinton should lower public expectations about what government can do to change people’s daily lives and focus on things that will affect people immediately.

Despite the defeats and recurrent crises of the first two years of the Administration, Gergen said that Clinton has been a better President than is generally recognized and still has an opportunity to reclaim the public’s faith.

“Let me just say . . . that Bill Clinton substantively has been a more successful President than he has been politically,” Gergen said at a breakfast with Times reporters and editors. “I think he has accomplished more than he’s given credit for.”

Gergen acknowledged that Clinton and his senior staff--including Gergen himself--had made countless mistakes, from the early effort to integrate gays into the military to the over-ambitious design of the failed health care program.

The former editor of U.S. News & World Report said that his hiring in mid-1993 was met with resentment by many of the younger members of the Clinton staff, not only because he was given a broad portfolio to advise on policy and public relations but also because he had served in three Republican administrations.

Gergen also said that he and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had clashed on a number of policy issues, including health care, and that by the end of 1993 he had lost his effectiveness and had decided to leave the White House. But Clinton persuaded him to stay and earlier this year he found a home at the State Department.

Gergen said that Clinton was handicapped by two currents not of his making--public skepticism about the government’s ability to handle complex national problems and economic anxiety that caused people to seek someone to blame for their stagnant wages and dead-end jobs.

“I think that’s made it more difficult to govern and I think that’s created an angrier electorate. That kind of anger and resentment looks for scapegoats,” Gergen said. “It’s a free-floating kind of resentment that may attach itself to immigrants as it did with (California’s) Proposition 187. It may attach itself to all sorts of forces. And I think it has attached itself, to a very large degree, to President Clinton, so that he becomes the object of a lot of the unhappiness that people feel in their own lives.”

A senior White House aide agreed with much of Gergen’s diagnosis of Clinton’s ills but noted testily that Gergen had been present at the creation of many of the problems he identified.