Clinton Postpones Deciding on Base Closures Until Next Week

President Clinton on Friday delayed until next week a decision on recommendations from an independent commission to close dozens of military bases as aides struggled to free the President from what has become a tangle of interagency and political knots.

What White House officials once saw as a straightforward opportunity to resist the closure of California’s huge McClellan Air Force Base and fight for jobs there on military grounds has turned into a maze of contradictory assertions and an opportunity for Republicans to accuse Clinton of playing politics.

White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta and Deputy Defense Secretary John White met Friday to work out the latest complication: assertions by the base closure commission that a Pentagon counterproposal to shift many of the jobs at McClellan into the private sector is already covered by the commission’s recommendations and is more political posturing than significant job saving for the key electoral state.

The Pentagon plan emerged earlier this week as an alternative to outright rejection of the commission recommendation to close the maintenance depots at McClellan and Kelly Air Force Base near San Antonio, after Pentagon officials concluded they could not make a defensible military case for keeping the huge depots open.

“The current language permits privatization at McClellan, except for the communications work that we recommended be moved to Tobyhanna” Army Depot in Pennsylvania, Alan J. Dixon, the commission chairman, said in a phone interview Friday.