Obstacle Course

THE WHITE HOUSE STAFF FILED INTO THE EAST Room last Friday at 5 p.m. for what had been regarded internally as a badly needed "pep rally." Chief of staff Mack McLarty opened with some keep-your-chin-up remarks. Then came some encouraging words from Tipper Gore and a circumspect comment from Hillary Rodham Clinton. "It's just the first week," she said. Al Gore spoke next, making a joke about his dancing ability. The mood grew lighthearted, reminding several in the audience of what one called "the whole campaign bus-tour thing."

But when President Clinton began to speak, the atmosphere changed. Clinton laid into his aides for leaking information to the press and lamented his Administration's maladroit handling of the gays-in-the-militar y crisis. He warned his team to stop dumping on each other in print, to "rise above the Washington culture" and "live by your values, not theirs." The clear message, said a staffer, was that Clinton still believes he can change the way things work in the nation's capital.

If only it were so. Just when he wanted to focus "like a laser beam" on the economy, Clinton was sidetracked for five days by a once obscure campaign promise to lift the nearly 50-year-old ban on gays in the military. No sooner had Clinton emerged from the embarrassing miscalculation about Zoe Baird than he found himself in an even stickier political quagmire. After promising in his Inaugural Address to end an era of "deadlock and drift," Clinton was suddenly at war with the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as members of his own party in Congress. Worse yet, the spectacle of Clinton clinging so resolutely to his gay-rights pledge after breaking broader promises on taxes, the deficit and spending projects raised questions about his judgment. "The most disturbing thing isn't that he fought for gays," said a Clinton adviser. "It's that he dumped the middle-class tax cut, signaled that he would raise taxes on most Americans, and then stuck by the gays. That's the way the Republicans will play this."

Clinton temporarily quelled the crisis by reaching an agreement with his principal antagonist on the issue, Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, to halt the practice of asking military recruits about their sexual orientation, while postponing an official lifting of the ban until July 15. With Nunn's support, Clinton had enough swing votes in the Senate to block a Republican attempt -- expected this week -- to write the existing ban into law. And he earned six months to concentrate on more pressing matters while aides worked out the details of a permanent repeal. "I am looking forward to getting on with this issue," he said, "and with these other issues, which were so central to the campaign."

A top Clinton aide insisted last week that the crisis had been "completely unavoidable" ever since Clinton first promised to lift the ban in a speech in Boston in October 1991. But a close look at how Clinton and his team tried in recent weeks to defuse the issue shows that the Administration has much to learn about the Washington political game. The Clinton team was simply unprepared to handle the powerful legislators, military brass and internal leakers who turned the gays-in-the-military debate into a disaster.