NEWS ANALYSIS : Tortured Decision-Making Wounds Clinton’s Standing

As he wrestled this week with the proposal to scale back or close 106 military installations, President Clinton demonstrated a decision-making style that has become an election-season vulnerability for him and an embarrassment to many Democratic allies.

In agonizing for two weeks over the fate of the military facilities, including McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento, Clinton took fire from California politicians for supposed insensitivity to the state’s economy and from GOP leaders for meddling in a process intended to be above politics.

The deliberations, which ended with Clinton accepting the recommendation for closure, put the President “on both sides of the issue, and [he] got the worst of both worlds,” said Rep. Julian C. Dixon (D-Los Angeles).

This style has been evident in decisions going back to the beginning of Clinton’s term. It is apparent in varying degrees in recent deliberations on U.S. involvement in Bosnia, his revised 1996 budget and even the review of federal affirmative action policies under way since February. In each instance, Clinton has been pounded by both sides during deliberations in which he appeared at various moments to be coming down on different sides of the issue.

The cost is clear. Public perceptions of Clinton’s decision-making-in-agony are reflected in the relatively low ratings he gets for leadership, pollsters say. And publicity about such prolonged deliberations focuses attention on the decision-making process, the unseemly sausage-making of governance that is rarely flattering to leaders.

Three years ago, when he was a relatively new face on the national scene, Clinton’s style was interpreted generally as conscientious deliberation--an intelligent leader taking time to understand all sides of a question and to get the answer right. Now, even to some admirers, it can look like undisciplined fiddling.

And for all the criticism of White House staff work, the problem does not reside with the employees but almost entirely with their boss. Clinton’s decision to accept the final round recommendations of the bipartisan base closing commission provides one of the best examples.

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Clinton was warned by outgoing officials of the George Bush Administration that the wisest course on the politically explosive base-closing issue was to move as quickly as possible. Doing so, they said, would prevent the controversy from escalating.

In that spirit, Clinton took less than a day in 1993 to dash off his response to a set of proposals from the bipartisan commission set up to handle the issue.

But in this fourth and last round of closings, the White House first gave hints that the President was going to reject the closure list. Then, shifting ground, it signaled that he would accept the plan, so long as he could get a statement from the commission chairman, former Democratic Sen. Alan J. Dixon, that the Pentagon has the authority to turn a large number of military jobs at McClellan into private jobs.

But commission members and other experts said that the extra steps, which added time and controversy to the process, were never necessary to do what the White House wanted. “They’re being accused of politicizing the process, but they’re going to get no political payoff,” said Dr. Loren B. Thompson, a respected defense consultant who was an early Clinton supporter. “This shows their extraordinary ability to reap the worst of all worlds.”

Previous rounds of presidential deliberations have produced similar results. Perhaps the most damaging was Clinton’s effort to make the armed services more open to gays. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was designed to allow gays to serve as long as they kept their sexual orientation to themselves.

Clinton promised the first day after his election to formulate a new policy. When he announced it eight months later, gay activists whose hopes had been raised by the President’s pledge were disappointed. And the opposition had been given plenty of time to mobilize against the policy.

Clinton aides have since acknowledged that the deliberations over gays in the military gave the impression that the Administration was preoccupied with issues that had little to do with the everyday concerns of most Americans. Some have called the undertaking the Administration’s biggest setback, along with the failed health care reform effort.

As a fresh-faced presidential candidate in 1992, Clinton impressed many political observers by spending months molding his election-year position on free trade, trying out different views, looking into policy details and demanding ever more data before taking a stand.

In the White House, he sometimes has encouraged dissent and argument among his entire staff, then taken them all on in debate. Two years ago, Clinton asked for a general debate about the wisdom of the balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

When every senior aide had weighed in against it, Clinton rejected their conclusions. “Have any of you ever been a professor of constitutional law? Well, I have,” one person present remembers him saying. Later still, Clinton doubled back on his decision and chose not to endorse the amendment.

Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, said that Clinton is at the extreme end of a spectrum among presidents in his habit of conducting deliberations in public. “He tends to aerate issues more than other presidents have,” Beschloss said.

Clinton’s aides and defenders say that the problem arises in part from his ability to grasp the details of both sides in unusual detail.

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It also grows from the inherent difficulty of his ideological position, according to the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Mann. Clinton is trying to stake out a new moderate ground on issues at a time when the political center is in collapse.

White House aides and some analysts blame the press, too, for an increasing preoccupation with governmental process that has put policy-making under a microscope.

Howard Paster, Clinton’s former head of congressional relations, said that any style of decision-making will provoke some attacks. For instance, he said, a President such as Richard Nixon, who was inclined to spring decisions on the public, was criticized as secretive.

“If you’re secretive you’re criticized, if you make decisions too quickly, you’re criticized for being hasty,” said Paster.

But he acknowledged that the system of more or less open debate at the Clinton White House “does carry a political price.”