Calling Plays for the Gipper

Jim Baker's strategy group nudges policy toward the middle

In the eyes of right-wing critics, the eight or so aides who meet almost every day in the White House have diverted the President from his ideological principles and led him down the primrose path of moderation and compromise. To others, the ad hoc group is the dynamo behind Ronald Reagan's legislative successes and the key to the biggest challenge of his presidency, the proposed 1982 tax increase. "It is the driving force in the White House today," says a top Reagan loyalist. "It sets the agenda for what we're doing and where we're going."

Known by the misleadingly modest title of Legislative Strategy Group (L.S.G.), the brain trust that has coalesced around Chief of Staff James Baker, 54, has become the Tolkien ring of power in the White House. The group does not appear on any of the detailed charts drawn during the transition by Counsellor Edwin Meese, 50, to map the flow of White House authority. Rather, it was conceived shortly after the Inauguration by Baker's deputy, Richard Darman, 39, to coordinate the passage of Reagan's economic program. "It was important that everyone in the Administration knew there was a clearing house," explains Darman. Other core participants: Baker's partners in the White House top troika, Michael Deaver, 44, and Meese; Communications Director David Gergen, 40; Kenneth Duberstein, 38, the Administration's gregarious and highly effective lobbyist on Capitol Hill; Budget Director David Stockman, 35; and Craig Fuller, 31, who coordinates the work of the Cabinet.

By carefully choosing when to fight and when to compromise, the L.S.G. has scraped together enough votes to ensure victory in every major legislative battle this year: the final 1982 spending resolution, which passed the House by 13 votes; the balanced-budget amendment, which passed the Senate by two votes; and the substitute nuclear-freeze resolution, which passed the House by two votes. "They have had one hell of a record with Congress," says Robert Strauss, former chairman of the Democratic Party and a top troubleshooter for Jimmy Carter.

What has made the L.S.G. a lightning rod for the right is not its effectiveness in executing strategy but its success in moderating Reagan's policies. "A number of people thought there was a great distance between formulating policy and implementing it," says a key member of Baker's group. "That is a preposterous notion." In fact, most of the major initiatives of any Administration have to be modified and compromised as they are translated into legislation. Admits Meese's top deputy, James Jenkins: "The L.S.G. can make the work of the Cabinet councils unrecognizable." This is not necessarily a bad thing: in many cases the L.S.G. has blocked the excesses of overardent Reaganites.