No Miracles Yet

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Baker, who ordered the campaign to buy five minutes of television time on four networks last week to recap the main points of the Detroit speech, knows that the key to tough campaigning is, as he once put it, "repetition, repetition and repetition." Instead of 12 separate lines of attack on Clinton, says Jim Pinkerton, a counselor to the campaign, "we've boiled it down to 'You can't afford Bill Clinton, and you can't trust him.' "

It was the attorney in Baker that told Teeter two weeks ago to take another look -- "the way a trial lawyer would" -- at Clinton's contradictory descriptions of his draft record. Baker felt that the real value of the draft issue was not so much Clinton's behavior as a 23-year-old but his waffling and incomplete accounts of his actions and motives, and the questions they raised about his trustworthiness.

In the past the Bush team had undercut its attacks on Clinton's draft record by couching them in ridicule and bombast. Under Baker's orders, Teeter asked campaign counsel Bobby Burchfield to pull together the record in a clear, undramatic fashion and let the public judge. Burchfield turned out a lengthy, side-by-side comparison of Clinton's comments over the past year that fueled numerous news reports. "Basically," says Burchfield, "this is a situation where the histrionics could very easily get in the way of the message we're trying to put out, which is look at what the guy has said over the years. We're not going to dress it up in any sort of politicized way. We're just going to put it out there."

The draft was not the only cudgel the Baker forces were wielding against Clinton's integrity. Bush has begun to assert with increasing intensity that Clinton's record on the Gulf War, the North American Free Trade Agreement and even fuel economy standards for new automobiles is riddled with inconsistencies.

None of those are new lines of attack. But Baker has rearranged them under a simple and potentially devastating strategic framework: Whom do you trust? If Bush ca country doling out billions. Bush announced $8.6 billion in hurricane aid to Florida and Louisiana and export subsidies to farmers two weeks ago. When he cannot tap the U.S. Treasury, he is prepared to tap the reserves of foreign governments. Last week Bush made a special trip to St. Louis, home of McDonnell Douglas, where he backed a $9 billion sale of 72 F-15 fighters to Saudi Arabia.

Will Baker's magic work? Many campaign insiders believe his biggest challenge remains giving lasting substance to a presidency that never stood for much in the first place. "Yes, things are organized much better, and the work seems more channeled," says a White House official. "But it's hard to point to tangible progress on what we need, which is something to run on, a banner to charge forward under, or a reason to vote for George Bush."

There is growing talk in Republican circles that Bush should announce that Baker will stay on as chief of staff for a year after re-election. On that proposal, both Bush and Baker are mum. Bush resented having to ask Baker to bail him out one more time, and Baker was not keen to return to a job he had for four years under Ronald Reagan. "In the next two months," said a longtime Baker watcher at the campaign, "we're going to find out whether this is just another case for Jim Baker to win a verdict on or whether it's a mission."