Call it the bankers’ revolt. Bowles, Raines and Rubin–the men responsible for getting the president’s budget through Congress-each left a successful career in high finance to work for Bill Clinton. Trained in a world where time is money and smart advisers do their magic behind the scenes, Bowles & Co. are creatures of the boardroom, not the war room. Though their backgrounds are different (Rubin was a Wall Street wizard, Bowles was a venture capitalist and Raines helped run mortgage giant Fannie Mae), their styles are remarkably similar. Self-effacing while at the same time confident and ruthlessly efficient, the three former executives would like to impose a cool, corporate culture on Bill Clinton’s second term. The tougher task will be to bring genuine fiscal discipline to the government.
On the surface, the new buttoned-down style is clearly in. Clinton is a notoriously unpredictable CEO. So far, Bowles is getting high marks for reversing the fabled chaos of Clinton’s first term, (“We now have controlled chaos,” allows one adviser.) But bringing substantive changes will take longer. Last week could have been the bankers’ big moment: with Clinton’s approval ratings at an impressive 60 percent, the White House could have delivered a bold plan that would have whacked entitlements en route to real balance. Raines said Clinton’s budget heralded the nation’s return to “fiscal sanity? But the editorial pages and Republicans weren’t buying it. The Clinton plan was criticized for boosting popular education and social programs while postponing most painful cuts until the year after he leaves office.
So the bankers have their work cut out for them as they and national economic adviser Gene Sperling try to sell the.White House plan. Bowles, a courtly North Carolinian, says he’ll approach lawmakers “just like you do with a board of directors or stockholders. You make sure you tell the truth, you try to be forthright and you do your homework before you go.” The new approach has already won praise on the Hill-which, still in Republican hands, appreciates a bankerly approach. “Gone are the liberal ideologues,” House Majority Leader Dick Armey told GOP House members. “Now we have people we can work with.”
Inside the White House, Bowles is trying to keep Clinton on track. For the first time in five years, the president’s State of the Union Message was finished on time. It was a Bowles operation. One deputy was charged with vet-ting proposals submitted by the cabinet agencies. Raines’s budget crew made sure there was money for everything Clinton talked about. As a result, says one aide, “things weren’t being litigated at the keyboard at the eleventh hour.” The process went so smoothly that Bowles didn’t get involved again until a finished draft arrived on his desk the day before Clinton was to speak. In past years aides had to scamper down the White House driveway with the final draft as the president left for the Capitol.
Bowles has condensed the daily meeting schedule and instructed aides to present their ideas to Clinton in streamlined strategy memos instead of long-winded political tracts. During his first-term stint as deputy chief of staff, Bowles conducted a time and motion study of Clinton’s calendar and found the president’s time had been broken into ineffective 15-minute chunks. Bowles makes sure Clinton now gets three to four hours of executive “think time” each day-as well as regular escapes to the golf course.
Of course, having a schedule isn’t the same thing as sticking to it. Clinton still loves to digress, as Rubin was reminded last week. Called to the Oval Office for what was billed as a five-minute consultation on a technical matter, the treasury secretary emerged more than an hour later. The president, an aide said, had launched into a philosophical discussion of why it was OK to be for a balanced budget but against a balanced-budget amendment.
Though Bowles’s success can be measured by how the trains run on time, Raines and Rubin have to balance the books. Raines, an Al Gore protege, is in the unenviable position of crafting Clinton budgets scheduled to blow up shortly after Gore hopes to take over in the West Wing, Supremely cautious, Raines is emerging as a reassuring and telegenic spokesman. An African-American respected equally by the capital’s black and white communities, he was praised last month for proposing an innovative plan to bail out the District of Columbia government by replacing the city’s federal subsidy with a more valuable package of federal services. Raines will need that kind of finesse when the budget haggling starts this week. The first battle is likely to be over tax reductions, especially on capital gains.
Rubin, a four-year veteran of the Clinton economic team, has already mastered the art of soothing Republicans and the market alike. A lifelong Wall Streeter who breakfasts each week with Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, Rubin knows the power of his utterances. Late last week Rubin deliberately sent the dollar tumbling by noting to financial reporters that the dollar had been strong “for some time now”-code that Washington may not intend to keep it that way. Rubin, a lifelong Democrat, jokes about being a “traitor to his class.” The same might be said of Bowles and Raines. All three of Clinton’s bankers could probably slip unnoticed into a moderate Republican administration–and that’s perfect for a president trying to keep himself
