By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 12, 1997; Page A01

The gathering started calmly, then took a dramatic turn. White House Chief of Staff Erskine B. Bowles was before the House Democratic caucus this month to promote the budget deal he had brokered with Republicans, when he faced a sudden barrage.

Rep. David R. Obey, a blunt-spoken Wisconsin liberal, accused the administration of turning its back on Democrats. Bowles, a genteel North Carolina businessman, listened silently for several minutes – plainly taken aback, according to several people in the audience, by the intensity of Obey's challenge – before rising to his own defense. "I'm a pretty damn good Democrat, too," he declared.

It was a point that Leon E. Panetta, Bowles's more partisan predecessor at the White House, would never have needed to emphasize. Yet, for the moment, Bowles's brand of consensus politics is carrying the day in Washington. The budget agreement, which the 51-year-old investment banker played a critical role in negotiating, is the most vivid illustration so far.

If not all Democrats like the result, it is clear that one who does is President Clinton. Bowles, according to White House aides, reflects a president who, after struggling to define himself in the first term, has settled in a place he finds comfortable during the second. The ideological tug of war among different aides that previously marked Clinton's White House is at a lull.

"Erskine comes to the job to find out what the president wants and do what the president wants, as opposed to trying to influence what the president wants," said deputy chief of staff John D. Podesta.

"He represents the center – his views, his allegiances, his way of carrying himself," House Minority Whip David E. Bonior (D-Mich.) said of Bowles. "That's where he is, and that's where the [budget] deal is."

This makes Bowles an ideal symbol for a season in which the White House and Capitol Hill are putting process over ideology.

Republicans rejoice that they have found a man in the White House they can deal with; White House aides say the chief of staff turns cold when the office conversation turns raucously partisan.

In an interview in his White House office on Thursday, Bowles said he is "not the most ardent politician. I believe there's good and bad on both sides." He has "spent my life doing deals," and said he came to Washington to do a deal on the budget.

And how did he do it? For an answer, Bowles lapsed into the business language he favors. The key, he said, was to assemble a negotiating team "with a common buy-in to the goal," then build a "framework to get to yes, both from a policy and process standpoint."

With a budget agreement at least tentatively in hand, Bowles is noncommittal about how much longer he will stay at the White House, but regularly emphasizes his eagerness to return to North Carolina. "I want to go back to the business world, I want to go back to my family, and have a life again," he said. "I'm a creature of the private sector; it is my natural habitat."

Bowles, moreover, has found parts of Washington's political habitat not at all to his liking. White House aides said he was surprised and shaken earlier this spring when he was called in front of a grand jury in Little Rock. Whitewater investigators wanted to know about calls he had made to try to line up work for Clinton friend and former Justice Department official Webster L. Hubbell. "It bothered me a lot," Bowles acknowledged.

Although Bowles lately seems to have recovered his balance, several White House aides said they do not expect him to be on the job at the end of the year.

In the meantime, he has imposed his business-oriented style on the White House, with results that so far remain muddy. He has shuffled meeting schedules and surrounded himself with a larger-than-normal personal coterie. He hired an assistant to be "chief of staff to the chief of staff" – a brand new title.

When he took charge in January, he ordered senior White House staff to write memos outlining their "goals, objectives, and time lines." This formal approach caused some rolled eyes and grousing among Clinton aides, but Bowles said it will help him hold people accountable.

A polite, genial man, Bowles is generally well-liked among those who have worked closely with him at the White House and on Capitol Hill, according to a wide range of people in both places. In both places, however, there is debate about whether his business background and values have made a successful transplant in the political soil of Washington.

On Capitol Hill, some Democrats worry that Bowles represents a presidency running low on ideas, with little ardor for battle on behalf of progressive causes.

Bonior, for instance, said he finds Bowles "courteous" and "very decent," but he and other liberals were dismayed that the White House negotiating team gave in to GOP demands to strike $5 billion in proposed spending to fix crumbling schools. It's a problem about which Clinton has said he is deeply worried.

Within the White House, judgments have also been mixed. Bowles's penchant for order and scheduling has meant that Clinton speeches are finished earlier, with more time to practice. The personal rivalries and turf wars that afflicted the first-term White House have for the most part been halted.

Yet there is little evidence the day-to-day work of government is proceeding more smoothly. The obsession with formality and process, some aides contend privately, has increased the time it takes to get decisions made. The pace of personnel appointments for the second term is far behind schedule.

Morale varies. Many senior aides say they appreciate Bowles's style of delegating and the enhanced authority it has given them, a sharp contrast to the centralized White House Panetta ran. Bowles sometimes thanks his deputies with a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies. Lower down in the ranks, however, some aides said they see Bowles as a remote figure, who has not infused the White House with a sense of excitement or larger purpose.

Bowles's style is low-key – no shouting or table-thumping – but serious. White House wisecrackers, such as Podesta and senior adviser Rahm Emanuel, come into meetings with jokes, but usually the best response they can elicit from Bowles is a quizzical smile.

Panetta used to love being on top of the latest political buzz, and encouraged staff members to share everything they knew. Bowles shows little appetite for this, and prefers communications to go through a formal chain.

The chief of staff's tempered style and ideology have won him one prominent fan.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who spoke frequently with Bowles during the budget talks, was overflowing with praise in a recent interview. In the final hours of negotiations, Gingrich recalled, he was going over details with Bowles in the office of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). Gingrich said it reminded him of a porch-front chat in a small town.

"We're all three southerners. . . . There was a chemistry there," Gingrich said. "It was totally businesslike – no posturing, no ego."

For some, praise from Gingrich is another name for criticism. The question is who should be the target. "There's part of me that wants to be upset with Bowles rather than be upset with the president," said one congressional Democrat, who asked not to be named. "I think: If only Leon were there. . . ."

But White House aides said Panetta and Bowles have served their particular purposes. In 1995 and 1996, Clinton's goal was to use the budget battles to define his differences with Republicans. In 1997, Clinton's goal was to overcome those differences and strike a deal.

Panetta's history with Republicans was akin to that between the Montagues and Capulets from "Romeo and Juliet," said Podesta; with no such history, Bowles has been better suited to overcome ancient hostilities.

Bowles has brought other changes. Panetta used to have two staff meetings each morning. One, at 7:30, was for a dozen or so senior staff; the other, at 8:15, included 30 or more lower-ranking aides.

Bowles, impatient with so many meetings, merged the two. His 7:45 a.m. includes about two dozen people. Some White House aides believe this is too big to get serious business done, and at the same time it neglects others who used to get to hear Panetta directly.

After the staff meeting, Bowles heads in, usually around 9:30 a.m., to give Clinton his morning briefing. Bowles, accompanied by deputies Podesta and Sylvia Mathews, usually stays in the office to hear a second briefing by national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger.

Bowles also took a different approach to the budget talks. Panetta, a veteran member of Congress before joining the administration, had conducted most of the negotiations himself. Bowles rarely sat in when his negotiating team of national economic adviser Gene Sperling, budget director Franklin D. Raines and legislative liaison John Hilley went to Capitol Hill.

Instead, Bowles said, he kept abreast of the talks, and made phone calls and personal visits to lawmakers when he felt it was essential. Yet Bowles was the principal figure steering the administration side of the talks at the White House. During the thick of the talks, strategy sessions with senior aides took place twice a day. When Gingrich announced last winter that he was flexible about the timing of tax cuts, Bowles quickly orchestrated the administration's gesture; a new round of budget talks was scheduled for the next day.

The budget agreement, Bowles said, is a model of how Washington can work. "There was extraordinary good faith on the other side of this deal and on our side also," he said.

And he rejects the notion that the administration compromise sells out progressive principles that he said are important to him and Clinton. There is money for education, he said, and, with a deal done, more time for Clinton to devote to such problems as racial healing. In his view the budget deal advanced Democratic values, the point he made to Obey.

"It was important if someone was going to talk to me that way, I wanted to make sure there was some mutual respect on both sides," Bowles said. "His viewpoint is quite different than mine, but that doesn't mean I can't respect his viewpoint, and that he can't understand that perhaps there's also some merit on my side."