Rolling Back Clinton

By JAMES CARNEY AND JOHN F. DICKERSON

One morning at the nub end of Bill Clinton's presidency, Clinton chief of staff John Podesta walked into a senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room waving a copy of USA Today. Holding the paper aloft, Podesta read the headline out loud, "Clinton actions annoy Bush." The article detailed the new rules and Executive Orders the outgoing President was issuing in his final days, actions aimed in equal measure at locking in Clinton's legacy (in areas like environmental protection) and bedeviling his successor. "What's Bush so annoyed about?" Podesta asked with a devilish smile. "He's got four years to try to undo all the stuff we've done."

As he stood on the Capitol steps on Saturday, George W. Bush was already at work doing just that. Simply by taking the oath of office, he believes, he performed his first symbolic act in the rollback of Clintonism. At nearly every campaign stop for 18 months, Bush promised that when he raised his hand and swore on the Bible, he would be restoring "honor and dignity" to a sullied White House. The tune in Washington will now come from the B side of the baby boom--the kids who never dreamed of turning on, tuning in or dropping out. Clinton and his staff were hardly hippies, but the Bushies regard them as such. "There will be no blue jeans in the Oval Office," sniffs a Bush aide, referring to the relaxed dress code that sometimes gave Clinton's West Wing a dorm-room feel.

It's easy to require neckties, harder to roll back policies. Clinton's high approval rating and Bush's loss of the popular vote make drastic ideological shifts nearly impossible. And so Bush started small on Saturday, using his Executive power for the first time to establish a national day of prayer and tinker with ethics rules governing the behavior of White House employees. His first 180 days of policymaking will feature a plan to roll back some Clinton tax increases, but Bush wants to spend more time and energy defining his own agenda--reforming schools, reorganizing the military and funding faith-based charities--than undoing the recent past.

He will be under constant pressure to do more. The Bush suggestion box is bursting with helpful hints from supporters who want W. to hack away at Clinton initiatives on everything from restricting diesel-truck emissions to costly ergonomic workplace rules. Miners have asked Bush to halt Clinton's aggressive use of an 1872 mining law that the industry says makes it too easy to block development. Business groups want to overturn a rule that bars companies from federal contracts if they have been accused of violating a federal law. Microsoft hopes that Bush's body language from the campaign means his Justice Department will drop, or at least tone down, the government's case against the software giant. Tobacco companies are counting on Bush to give up the 1999 federal racketeering suit against them. And in his final month as President, Clinton provided a raft of additional targets, including measures announced just last week to protect more than 1 million acres of federal land, such as the Upper Missouri River Breaks in Montana and a portion of Arizona's Sonoran Desert. Property-rights advocates and Western Republican Governors howl that these vast protected spaces--what one Bush adviser calls "land grabs"--hurt local logging companies and property owners.

On Saturday, Bush chief of staff Andrew Card sent a memo to all agencies ordering them to halt the actual printing of new regulations, enacting the same ad hoc moratorium that Presidents Reagan and Clinton used to prevent their predecessors' last-minute work from taking effect. Among Bush's targets: new environmental restrictions on runoff from animal-feeding operations and guidelines for managed-care programs under Medicare.

Social conservatives hope Bush will act as quickly as Clinton did when he came to office, but with the opposite intent. Clinton signed five quick orders to expand abortion rights by, among other things, reversing a rule limiting abortion counseling at federally funded clinics and lifting a ban on abortions at military facilities. As early as next week, aides say, Bush may delight conservatives by signing an order that would withhold funding from overseas agencies that even discuss abortion with patients. Sources tell TIME that the so-called Mexico City provision, named for the city where Ronald Reagan first discussed the prohibition, was the topic of a memo last week from Secretary of State Colin Powell to the White House, outlining the options for carrying out this order. Powell, who is pro-choice, recommended no specific course of action. Bush is evaluating a Clinton order that prohibits discrimination against homosexuals in federal jobs, but conservatives doubt he will have the stomach to reverse it. He doesn't want to bring on a full-throated cultural war by taking on pro-choicers, gay-rights advocates and affirmative-action supporters all at once.

New Presidents often use Executive action to pay off their ideological backers quickly, but some Bush aides argue that he isn't under pressure to do so because he has picked Cabinet officers who appeal to particular interest groups. Business and property-rights advocates may be temporarily satisfied knowing that Gale Norton, his pick for Interior Secretary, shares their views. And his choice of John Ashcroft for Attorney General may quell the appetite of Christian conservatives for immediate action on abortion and gay rights.

But Bush would hate to have his first weeks in office be remembered only for efforts to blot out the work of his popular predecessor. He can't afford to look like the front man for right-wingers on an ideological joyride. (Liberals would love for him to inhabit that caricature.) That's why he put his top political adviser, Karl Rove, in charge of drawing up a detailed action plan for the first 180 days of the Bush Administration. Rove's task: to take the items in the agenda Bush campaigned on, turn them into pieces of actual legislation and then choreograph their rollout for maximum political benefit. The best antidote to the public's lingering qualms about Bush's legitimacy, says an adviser, is to "show that we're very busy doing things that real people want. We have to get some things done--fast."

Bush advisers and Capitol Hill Republicans say Rove has laid out a plan--in a series of memos and calendars--for the boss's first four weeks. In his first legislative act, on Tuesday, Bush plans to send Congress a package of education reforms that would require states to test students, promote character and abstinence programs, and give parents of kids in failing public schools vouchers that they can use to help pay tuition at private and parochial schools. Next week Bush will introduce legislation on another signature issue, a proposal to funnel federal funds to community- and faith-based charities that do everything from feed the homeless to treat the addicted. Then, just as they recess for most of February, members of Congress will receive a copy of Bush's 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax-cut proposal to tuck into their travel bags.

The tax cut is Bush's most profound attack on Clinton's economic legacy. In 1993, without G.O.P. support, Clinton pushed through a budget that raised taxes on the affluent and sliced into the burgeoning deficit. Most economists credit that deal with helping launch the next seven years of economic growth, but Bush partisans see it differently. "The Bush tax cut is a direct rollback of Clinton's largest tax increase in history," says Bush aide Ed Gillespie. But Bush may not end up cutting into Clinton's overall spending levels. His emphasis on education, military and health-care spending won't let him. "It would not be surprising to me if you got bigger budget requests from the Bush Administration than you did the Clinton Administration," says conservative economist Stephen Moore.

Bush will have trouble enough trying to execute Rove's plan in the face of Democratic opposition. But his biggest distraction may come from Republican rival John McCain, who is poised to launch an all-out battle on behalf of his favorite issue, campaign-finance reform. McCain will reintroduce his signature bill in the Senate this week and unveil a new grass-roots organization, Americans for Reform, to browbeat Congress into passing his ban on soft-money contributions. Bush, who hates the bill, plans to meet with McCain on Wednesday to try to talk him into delaying a vote until later in the year.

Bush would rather do battle with Clinton's ghost than a Senator of his own party. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer was right when he labeled Clinton's last-minute pile of new rules, orders and treaties the work of a "busy beaver." The former President's aides had mischief in mind when they conjured up some of these actions, especially the designation of more than 5.6 million acres of federal land as national monuments. If Bush wants to reverse those orders, he will face howls of protests from environmental groups. "We laid a few traps," chirps a happy Clinton aide. In the 95 years since the practice was established under Teddy Roosevelt, no President's designation of a national monument has ever been reversed by a successor. But Bush aides insist they can circumvent the moves--and please the mining and logging industries--by writing land "management plans" for the monuments that allow for some commercial use. "Oh, right," replies Bruce Reed, Clinton's domestic-policy adviser. "I'm sure the public won't notice that."

Bush's new neighbors may notice one change. With his first day on the job came a new set of license plates. In solidarity with Washingtonians who demand statehood, Clinton had the new presidential limo outfitted with D.C. tags marked with the phrase TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. Bush doesn't support D.C. statehood and believes public vehicles should not be used to make political statements. And no token of the Clinton era is too small for a rollback.

--With reporting by Ann Blackman, Sally B. Donnelly and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Ann Blackman, Sally B. Donnelly and Douglas Waller/Washington