Bush Era Off to a Slow Start, Critics Agree

WASHINGTON — No modern presidency seemed more prepared than George Bush’s for getting off to a smooth start. But, most experts agree, no modern presidency has so thoroughly failed to live up to its advance billing.

Bush himself was an old Washington hand who knew the byways and pitfalls of politics in the capital. And long before his election--even before his nomination--Bush had appointed a trusted aide, Charles G. Untermeyer, to plan for the transition from the Reagan Administration to the Bush Administration.

The Bush transition, moreover, had the advantage of a new industry of scholarship that sprang up in 1988. Never had the peculiar American institution of presidential transition been studied as it was last year. Never had an incoming Administration received so much written counsel from scholars, politicians and even former presidents on the process of taking over.

As soon as the new President was elected, a stream of scholarly reports, all brimming with advice, descended on his transition staff.

But although the scholars and specialists on presidential transition are not as hard on Bush as many editorial cartoonists and columnists, they still rate the first six weeks of the Administration as no more than so-so.

There are no failing grades, but the report card is lackluster--hardly what would be expected from such a promising student, the scholars agree.

“Bush has been playing theme music all along,” said Carl Brauer of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, probably the foremost scholar on presidential transitions. “A lot of effective public relations has been going on. Whether this is going to be translated into effective governance, I seriously doubt. . . .”

Brauer said the first weeks of the Bush Administration could presage a weak presidency.

“He is not going to be demonstrating to the public or to Congress that he is a powerful guy who can get things done. What I see ahead is that he is going to be suffering a lot of nicks and bruises. He is going to be nickeled and dimed to death.”

First 5 Months

Scholars use the term “transition” to describe the five months or so between Election Day and the settling in of a new Administration. This period is both crucial and uncertain because the top level of the federal bureaucracy is normally replaced when a new President takes over. The President makes about 4,000 political appointments, 800 of them subject to Senate confirmation.

In assessing the Bush transition, the analysts looked at the pace and quality of appointments, the Administration’s ideas and programs, and the overall image projected by the new President and his team. All three qualities are, of course, interrelated.

Most analysts agree that the new Bush Administration has failed to present a coherent program with new ideas for tackling the nation’s problems. “Really, this is a firefighting operation,” said Stephen J. Wayne, a George Washington University political science professor who served as project director for the transition task force of the National Academy of Public Administration last fall.

‘Beyond Latest Flame’

“Bush has people who are reasonably good at putting out fires but have not the capacity to see beyond the latest flame,” he said.

“It’s still difficult to discern the two or three things that Bush wants to be identified with,” said Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former Carter White House official who served as one of the executive directors of a 1988 transition task force headed by former Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter. “The kinder, gentler idea is fine, but it is difficult in a time of limited budget. He needs to provide a little more muscle to that.”

“There is no sense that there has been a strategy or a real program,” said the Kennedy School’s Brauer. “What we kind of have, essentially, is a reactiveness to squeaky wheels.”

Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, who worked for the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon White Houses and has written extensively about the presidency, sought to put the lack of ideas into perspective:

“The Bush Administration lost the initiative in that time that people were really watching,” he said. “This presupposes that they had something to propose, to put on the table. But they didn’t. The budget message was a perfect reflection of this--just changes around the margin.

“This is a city of news junkies that want something to happen quickly,” Hess continued. “But this is an Administration that is saying, hey, things are going pretty well, and we don’t have any money anyway.”

One significant side of the Bush transition image received a good deal of praise from Eizenstat, who believes Bush has skillfully managed to separate himself from the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

“Bush has established to a greater degree than one might have thought his own persona,” Eizenstat said. “He has very skillfully identified those soft spots in the Reagan profile--his inaccessibility to the press, his confrontational attitude toward Congress, his inattention to details, even his age--and he has been able to favorably contrast himself with his predecessor, a man who was very popular. That’s a very important thing.”

But Eizenstat also believes that the hesitant mood of the Administration threatens the image. “The slowness threatens to squander a lot of the momentum that a new President has in the honeymoon period,” he said. “This is the time that he must make full use of the afterglow of the election. You never recapture this moment.”

A similar assessment came from Hess. “Even this President who promised very little in the campaign should engineer some decisive victory early in his Administration,” he said. “People are noticing him then and (will) say: ‘He’s a winner!’ ” All Bush has managed to engineer so far, said Hess, is the seemingly unavoidable defeat over the nomination of former Sen. John Tower as secretary of defense.

Although the specialists expressed their views during the rancor of the nomination battle, they did not believe that the Tower conflict, by itself, damaged the transition. The problems of the Bush transition, in their view, had deeper roots than the Tower fiasco; it was merely indicative of a transition in trouble.

One of the clearest symptoms of Bush’s transition problems is the languid pace of appointments, several specialists say--though others defend Bush’s showing in this area. All analysts agree that the pace of appointments has been slow, much slower than expected, but they disagree on whether this matters.

The new Administration so far has picked hardly more than a score of key officials below the level of the Cabinet, out of more than a hundred such jobs that must be filled if a new President is to gather in the reins of government.

Eizenstat, for one, believes the extremely slow pace of appointments “is beginning to have an effect on policy,” with the Bush Administration showing hesitancy about dealing with Central America, Soviet maneuvering in the Middle East and peace in Cambodia.

One of the strongest and most influential defenders of the Bush Administration’s handling of appointments, on the other hand, is Mark A. Abramson, executive director of the Center for Excellence in Government, the private institute that did the most thorough research last fall on the task of recruiting personnel below the Cabinet level during transition.

Luxury of Time

“They still have the luxury of taking their time,” he said. “I would rather that they go slowly and make good choices than they go fast and make bad choices. Of course, you don’t want them to go slowly and make bad choices. . . . But I’m hoping that the extra time they take will pay off in the end.”

As for quality, Abramson said: “I would quibble with some appointments but, by and large, they are good.” He singled out Lawrence S. Eagleburger as deputy secretary of state and John H. Robson as deputy secretary of the Treasury as examples of first-rate appointments below the Cabinet level.

Prof. Wayne agrees with Abramson’s assessment. “They have been decent appointments,” he said. “The Administration is an inside-the-Beltway Administration with people who have all had experience with government and demonstrate knowledge of government and the ability to manage.”

The measured pace, in Abramson’s view, actually amounts to a vote of confidence in the career civil servants who are filling many of the top jobs while waiting for the White House to announce the new appointments. This reflects President Bush’s favorable feelings about the federal bureaucracy, a sharp turn from the attitude of his predecessor.

“The President met with senior civil servants on Jan. 26,” Abramson said. “He did something in six days that Ronald Reagan had not done in eight years.”

But even Abramson expected more positions to be filled by now. In an extensive study published before Election Day, his center described what it called the 116 most important jobs in government below the Cabinet.

After Bush’s election, Abramson said that “we’d be doing good” if the President-elect named half before Inauguration Day. In fact, Bush named only a handful. Even now, fewer than 25 have been announced.

Hess, of the Brookings Institution, agrees appointments have moved so slowly because Bush and his staff “have made what seemed to me a sensible assumption that they had the luxury of time.” The transition specialists attribute much of the delay in appointments to new standards in ethics, more extensive FBI security checks and, as Hess pointed out, the lack of urgency inherent in a friendly transfer of power.

But they also believe that delays have been caused by conflicts between Untermeyer, the 42-year-old pre-election transition chief who is now White House director of personnel, and Cabinet secretaries, who want to pick their own aides. When these conflicts occur, John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, is supposed to mediate them.

“These conflicts happen in every Administration,” Eizenstat said, “but there seems to be an impasse in this one. Presumably, the chief of staff should resolve this, but it doesn’t seem to be getting resolved. No one would have anticipated this, because these are all people who have been around government for a long time and know their way.”