A Thing Called Hope

By MICHAEL DUFFY

HAROLD ICKES DOESN'T LEAVE THINGS to chance. While he was running the Democratic Convention in New York City in 1992, he insisted the cashier's check for the confetti vendor be held in escrow in case the climactic balloon drop following Bill Clinton's acceptance speech flopped. Ickes' tactic forced the balloon man to climb into the rafters to cut the netting with a large knife. The sight of an armed man climbing through the lights at Madison Square Garden drove Clinton's security detail to distraction. "The Secret Service guys nearly shot the guy out of the rafters," recalled a White House aide, "all because of Harold."

Ickes' ruthless attention to detail is the main reason the Clintons have tapped the deputy chief of staff to take control of the President's re- election campaign. The team Clinton chose last week to run the Democratic Party was specially designed by Ickes to prevent any challenges to Clinton from inside the party. And Clinton has begun quietly to hire people for his re-election campaign. The President held his first meeting on the campaign last week, and top aides are busy seeking outside advice on how to remind middle-class Americans of Clinton's accomplishments. Ickes' role in the campaign signals something else: the close involvement of the First Lady. Ickes, more than anyone else, operates as her agent.

The new resolve, paced by Clinton's steady move to the center, seems to be working. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, Clinton had a 49% job-approval rating, up from 41% a month earlier. "It's getting better," said senior adviser George Stephanopoulos. It couldn't have got much worse. In the weeks after the mid-term elections, the Clinton White House had been in mourning, with top officials from the President on down trying out theories of "what happened" on one another. The soul-searching has ended, and no one sped the change more than Ickes. Last week, backed by Mrs. Clinton, he worked out the arrangement by which Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Don Fowler, a longtime party operative from South Carolina, will take over as co-chairmen of the party this week. Dodd will be the outside man, talking on television, taking on Newt Gingrich and defending the President on Whitewater, as necessary. Fowler, a close friend of Ickes', will try to resurrect the Democratic National Committee, which is a nightmare to manage and is $5 million in debt.

The arrangement will give the White House better control of the political operation as it heads toward 1996. Some party leaders are worried that Dodd- Fowler team is too liberal, but that was deliberate. Dodd has ties to the party's left, which Clinton needs to hold down, especially in a three-way race. Meanwhile, Ickes and Fowler are both aficionados of party rules, obsessed with delegate-filing deadlines and renowned for tying conventions up in arcane procedural fights. With both men on Clinton's team, the thinking goes, it will be harder for someone like Senator Bob Kerrey to challenge the sitting President.

At the moment the White House isn't worried so much about Kerrey as it is about House minority leader Richard Gephardt. Less than a month after Gephardt upstaged Clinton with a tax-cut proposal of his own, the Congressman won considerable attention last week for proposing a two-tiered flat tax starting at 11%. That move angered some at the White House, who may not realize that Gephardt was working on tax reform when many of them were still in school.

While the Missouri Congressman is unlikely to run, rumors of a challenge have the White House oddly spooked. Vice President Al Gore opposed the idea of having New Jersey Congressman Bob Torricelli head the Democratic Party because Gore feared, in part, that Torricelli might be a Gephardt mole. Still, Clinton is about to promote an old Gephardt hand: Terry McAuliffe, the D.N.C. finance chairman, will take over as finance director of the Clinton re-election campaign in March. McAuliffe raised most of Gephardt's money in 1988; his promotion alone makes a Gephardt run more difficult.

The White House constellation is shifting in other ways as well. Clinton has made no secret of his displeasure with pollster Stan Greenberg for misjudging the mood on health care, nor of his unhappiness over media adviser Mandy Grunwald's ads that too directly linked the G.O.P. Contract with America to Reaganomics. Consultant James Carville has been absent too long to be suddenly "out of favor," and strategist Paul Begala probably retains the strongest ties to the President from the old Gang of Four. Still, new stars may be rising in their place: Clinton has consulted Gore's favorite pollster, Mark Mellman, consultants David Doak and Bob Shrum and other longtime Democratic hands. All this strengthens Ickes' position inside the White House. So does his direct line to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Though she told nearly a dozen food writers, gossip columnists and even Ann Landers this week that she had been "naive and dumb" about politics last year, she is as influential as ever behind the scenes. Hillary Clinton urged her husband to back the tax-cut proposal in December, seek advice beyond the Gang of Four and turn Ickes loose on presidential politics. "Harold is Hillary," said an Administration official. "And they're finally putting her on the one project that she's best suited for: his re-election."

With reporting by JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON