Clinton to Create Economic Council : Transition: President-elect focuses on a major shift in White House structure as Cabinet appointments take a back seat. A business summit in Arkansas is planned.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — President-elect Bill Clinton likely will postpone the appointment of top Cabinet officers until early December, focusing instead on a plan to overhaul the government’s uppermost echelon to give economic affairs unprecedented status, his advisers said Sunday.

The plan, which officials of his transition team described as Clinton’s priority, would create an Economic Security Council in the White House whose power and authority would parallel that of the existing National Security Council.

The realignment, which would give a top Clinton deputy the power to coordinate the policies and actions of a broad range of federal agencies, could evolve as the most far-reaching revision in the government’s structure since Congress established the National Security Council 44 years ago.

In television interviews, both Warren Christopher, director of Clinton’s transition team, and Vernon E. Jordan Jr., its chairman, cautioned that the exact roles of the new council and its day-to-day director, an economic security adviser, remain to be determined.

Clinton had expressed general support for such an arrangement on various occasions during his campaign. But his advisers’ comments made clear for the first time how central to planning for the new Administration the new structure will be.

Christopher, a former deputy secretary of state, said that the shift would permit the Clinton White House to elevate economic affairs to “a considerably higher priority” than had been possible under a White House structure forged at the height of the Cold War.

Other aides said that the planned reconfiguration reflects lessons learned from a Bush Administration whose foreign affairs strengths were never matched in the conduct of economic matters, where policy was crippled by a lack of coordination.

The planned blueprint for the White House and a separate effort to bring business leaders to Little Rock to meet with Clinton reaffirmed signs that he intends to act with deliberation before naming officials who will lead his Administration.

Clinton himself spent the day reading, exercising and otherwise trying to recover from the exhaustion of the campaign. In an informal chat with reporters, he declined to comment about the transition, except to say that he is “going to work hard but not rush decisions.”

However, both Christopher and Jordan said that the priority given to restructuring the White House staff makes it unlikely that Clinton will name anyone to top Cabinet posts before Dec. 1. They said that the business summit, to be convened in the meantime, is intended to help the President-elect conduct an “audit” of the nation’s economic condition.

The Clinton advisers said that no date had yet been set for the meeting, but they indicated that it is likely to include not only business leaders and economists but perhaps members of Congress who might help the President-elect assess the health of the economy.

The advisers contended that the cautious pace of the transition effort would help the President-elect form a more unified team. They also say they remain confident that most if not all of his top appointees could be in place by Inauguration Day.

While planning for the new economic council is not expected to be overly time-consuming, aides said that it would certainly add delays to a process in which each key prospective appointee is expected to be interviewed at length by Clinton and his top aides before final decisions are announced.

Senate Democratic Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), in another televised interview, pledged his help in speeding pre-inauguration confirmation of the Cabinet choices. And Jordan, who is to head Clinton’s Washington-based transition board, said: “We will have a new Cabinet in the fullness of time, understanding that Jan. 20 is our limit.”

While the Clinton transition effort remains little more than a skeleton five days after the election, the Arkansas governor’s aides said that the operation will take fuller form in the next few days as Christopher appoints key deputies.

Among the campaign aides expected to assume important posts on the team are George Stephanopoulos, David Wilhelm and Eli Segal, a troika that played a key role in orchestrating the Clinton election victory. A Clinton adviser said that the leaders of some teams overseeing the development of policies on certain issues also could be named this week.

As guests on Sunday talk shows on each of the four major networks, Christopher and Jordan both acknowledged more fully than other Clinton advisers have done publicly that the struggle for control of the transition effort had erupted into a significant feud.

Both credited Clinton for acting swiftly last week to put an end to the friction, in part by accelerating by three days a planned announcement of their new roles.

“It was not allowed to fester,” Christopher said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

Apart from working to elevate economic affairs to new status within the coming Administration, the officials said that an urgent short-term priority would be to help find ways to reduce the size of the White House staff by 25%, as Clinton pledged during the campaign.

Those tasks may prove contradictory, however, if the new Economic Security Council is in fact modeled after the National Security Council, whose authority is derived in part from the expertise of its large and accomplished White House-based staff.

Although neither Christopher nor Jordan was willing to say exactly what role the council would perform, other aides said that it would almost certainly include secretaries of Treasury, Commerce and Labor; the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. trade representative and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

As a top-ranking assistant to the President, the new economic security adviser would convene meetings among representatives of the various departments and have authority to coordinate policies among them. Clinton likely would preside over formal Cabinet-level Economic Security Council meetings, just as the President has always headed its 44-year-old national security counterpart, officials said.

“Bill Clinton has said that this is a big priority, and I’m sure that he will carry that out,” Jordan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The plans sketched by Jordan and Christopher left little doubt that the White House economic security post will become one of the most important jobs in the new Administration, and it fanned a wave of speculation about who might be named to the post.

Clinton aides said that a likely front-runner is Robert B. Reich, a Harvard University economist who has known the Arkansas governor since their days at Oxford University. Other possible candidates include economic consultant Ira Magaziner and Ken Brody, a New York investment banker.

After leaving Little Rock for a weekend of rest and relaxation, Vice President-elect Al Gore and other Clinton aides are scheduled to return here today to get on with the transition process in earnest.

But Clinton, who confessed that he had been too worn out in the first two days after the election to read much other than fiction, gave little impression of haste.

Pausing to talk with reporters after a Sunday morning run, he said that his own exhaustion and painfully hoarse voice had made it difficult for him to return the scores of phone calls he has received since winning election. He said that he and his wife, Hillary, for the most part had “sort of sat around and talked to each other and tried to get collected.”

Asked what his first order of business will be as he returns to work today, the President-elect, whose weight fluctuated during the campaign, said: “I’m going to get up and take a run. I’m going to get myself back in shape.”