Bill's Dream Team Of Supersalesmen

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A FEW DAYS AFTER THE ELECTION, Bill Clinton sought advice from an unlikely quarter: the Bush White House. The President-elect wanted to talk process, not personalities, so he phoned Roger Porter, a senior Bush aide who had served on President Ford's economic policy council. Clinton quizzed Porter on his 1980 book, Presidential Decision Making, which recommends, among other things, that policy be deliberated on by a group similar to the National Economic Council that Clinton created last week.

The council will be chaired by the President and run from the White House by Robert Rubin, 54, now co-chairman of the Goldman, Sachs investment firm. In creating the group, Clinton will fulfill his campaign promise to place himself at the center of decisions on spending, taxes and trade, not reserve his full, hands-on attention for the foreign policy work of the National Security Council, the way Bush and many previous Presidents have done. Clinton's action also signaled his intention to restrict the power of Cabinet officers and to play them off against one another in the manner of Franklin Roosevelt.

Clinton's first Cabinet appointments reinforced the point: most are old hands in Washington and on Wall Street, chosen not for their new ideas but for their ability to sell, to Congress and financial markets, the program of public "investment" and deficit reduction on which Clinton campaigned. "Bill didn't want a brain trust," a transition official remarked. "He needed a sales force -- and that's what he's got." Indeed, Clinton, the Washington "outsider," might be said to have created the capital's most potent lobbying firm: Bentsen, Panetta, Rubin & Altman.

His choice for Treasury Secretary, Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen, 71, is a business-friendly millionaire who chairs the powerful Finance Committee. California Congressman Leon Panetta, 54, named as Clinton's Budget Director, commands high regard from his peers for his work as chairman of the House Budget Committee. Bentsen's deputy will be Roger Altman, 47, who served at Treasury under President Carter. Altman, an investment banker like Rubin, knows financiers from New York to Tokyo.

This top shelf of advisers drew applause from some surprising corners. The Wall Street Journal editorial board praised the team as "all-in-all reassuring." Bay Buchanan, a conservative Republican activist, joked that "the only liberal in the group is Bill Clinton."

Many Democrats, however, voiced suspicion of Bentsen's enthusiasm for granting special tax breaks to oilmen, real estate developers and wealthy investors. Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank allied with organized labor, complained that "you don't want to run your economic policy entirely around the concerns of Wall Street investors." Elena Hanggi from Little Rock, who trains community organizers and is invited to Clinton's economic conference this week, expressed "disappointment" at the pro-business slant of his top economic advisers but remains cautiously optimistic. In Washington as in Arkansas, she said, "Bill Clinton is trying to make changes without making waves."