No Miracles Yet

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON

Most Republicans breathed a sigh of relief when former Secretary of State James Baker took over the White House in August. Baker and his team, it was said, could make quick decisions. They could stop the leaks. Baker could talk straight to the stubborn President. As the engineer of Bush's 1988 win, Baker seemed just the political wizard that the President's often incoherent re- election campaign needed.

With seven weeks left before the election, it is clear that neither Baker nor his boss is working miracles -- yet. Baker does deserve credit for making Bush focus on his biggest weakness and the voters' overriding concern: the Administration's handling of the economy. In an appearance before the Economic Club of Detroit, Bush offered his clearest prescriptions so far. True, the Baker plan provided little new substance. But viewed as a campaign document rather than as a bold new policy manifesto, Baker's speech at least repositioned Bush as a man with a plan.

The first task Baker and his aides faced when they arrived at the White House was to impose order on a chaotic political operation. Decision making had ceased. Top-level meetings took hours and accomplished nothing. Second guessing and finger pointing were rampant. Advance men were refusing to journey to sites of future Bush events out of fear that they would be canceled en route. Bush had little confidence in his top advisers, and the strain was evident to anyone who watched him on television. Baker has told friends that before returning to the White House, he had discounted complaints about how sclerotic the operation had become. Once he got there, he confessed that he'd "had no idea how goddam bad it was."

As lting the things to do before they go home that night.

Each morning and night, Baker and his team meet with five other officials: Budget Director Richard Darman, campaign chairman Robert Teeter and manager Fred Malek, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and press secretary Marlin Fitzwater. Baker makes most of the decisions on scheduling, speeches and lines of attack; he demands same-day execution from his nine aides. "Once decisions get made," says Malek, "they stay made."

The most dramatic effect Baker has had so far is on the mood and performance of the President. Just knowing that his old friend is at his side, thinking through his every move, has put some badly needed spring back into Bush's step. All of Bush's speeches are now clearer, better written, more substantive and, most important, consistent. "For the first time in months," said a senior campaign official, "we are able to stay on our message for more than 12 hours."

Baker's team has already taken credit for toning down the party's overheated family-values rhetoric following the Republican Convention. After watching conservative speakers bash gays and Hillary Clinton in Houston, the Bakerites immediately sensed that the theme was, as an aide put it, "exclusionary, rather than inclusionary." Within hours of taking over at the White House, Baker team members requested poll data to back up their hunch. When they got them, they moved to more closely tie Bush's talk of family values to his policies. "There was just a consensus," said an official, "that we were eventually going to hurt ourselves if we weren't careful about how we handle it."

Baker, who ordered the campaign to buy five minutes of television time on four networks last week to recap the main points of the Detroit speech, knows that the key to tough campaigning is, as he once put it, "repetition, repetition and repetition." Instead of 12 separate lines of attack on Clinton, says Jim Pinkerton, a counselor to the campaign, "we've boiled it down to 'You can't afford Bill Clinton, and you can't trust him.' "

It was the attorney in Baker that told Teeter two weeks ago to take another look -- "the way a trial lawyer would" -- at Clinton's contradictory descriptions of his draft record. Baker felt that the real value of the draft issue was not so much Clinton's behavior as a 23-year-old but his waffling and incomplete accounts of his actions and motives, and the questions they raised about his trustworthiness.

In the past the Bush team had undercut its attacks on Clinton's draft record by couching them in ridicule and bombast. Under Baker's orders, Teeter asked campaign counsel Bobby Burchfield to pull together the record in a clear, undramatic fashion and let the public judge. Burchfield turned out a lengthy, side-by-side comparison of Clinton's comments over the past year that fueled numerous news reports. "Basically," says Burchfield, "this is a situation where the histrionics could very easily get in the way of the message we're trying to put out, which is look at what the guy has said over the years. We're not going to dress it up in any sort of politicized way. We're just going to put it out there."

The draft was not the only cudgel the Baker forces were wielding against Clinton's integrity. Bush has begun to assert with increasing intensity that Clinton's record on the Gulf War, the North American Free Trade Agreement and even fuel economy standards for new automobiles is riddled with inconsistencies.

None of those are new lines of attack. But Baker has rearranged them under a simple and potentially devastating strategic framework: Whom do you trust? If Bush ca country doling out billions. Bush announced $8.6 billion in hurricane aid to Florida and Louisiana and export subsidies to farmers two weeks ago. When he cannot tap the U.S. Treasury, he is prepared to tap the reserves of foreign governments. Last week Bush made a special trip to St. Louis, home of McDonnell Douglas, where he backed a $9 billion sale of 72 F-15 fighters to Saudi Arabia.

Will Baker's magic work? Many campaign insiders believe his biggest challenge remains giving lasting substance to a presidency that never stood for much in the first place. "Yes, things are organized much better, and the work seems more channeled," says a White House official. "But it's hard to point to tangible progress on what we need, which is something to run on, a banner to charge forward under, or a reason to vote for George Bush."

There is growing talk in Republican circles that Bush should announce that Baker will stay on as chief of staff for a year after re-election. On that proposal, both Bush and Baker are mum. Bush resented having to ask Baker to bail him out one more time, and Baker was not keen to return to a job he had for four years under Ronald Reagan. "In the next two months," said a longtime Baker watcher at the campaign, "we're going to find out whether this is just another case for Jim Baker to win a verdict on or whether it's a mission."

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Washington