Clinton Team Tries to Control Image : Transition: Aides concede coordination between the schedule and the message has proved more difficult in recent weeks than during the campaign.

By DAVID LAUTER

Nov. 19, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — This time--for the first time in a fortnight--events unfolded precisely the way Bill Clinton and his aides planned them: photogenic, well scripted and conveying a consistent message.

As a beaming Clinton walked to the portico outside the Oval Office with Bush on his left, then turned to face a crowd of whirring cameras and receive the ultimate power handshake, the intended message was simple and unmistakable: Here is a political winner ready and able to move into the nation’s highest office.

Pictures of such clarity have been rare for the Clinton team in the last two weeks. After a campaign in which they succeeded in transmitting and controlling a tight and consistent image of their candidate, the period since the election has been frustrating--filled with questions about everything from the family cat to the role of gays in the military.

Clinton’s image managers hope Wednesday’s triumph marks the turning of a corner. “It’s a process of making people comfortable with change,” said Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos. “Don’t underestimate the simple power of a picture.”

Yet Stephanopoulos and others concede that even though they no longer have an opposing camp trying every day to undermine their work, controlling the image during the transition has proved far more difficult than it was in the campaign.

“There’s no daily battle,” said Stephanopoulos. “You don’t have to keep score every day. The sense that at any moment something could derail you is gone, and that certainly helps.” At the same time, “there’s more weight on every word. There are more people, more questions. You can’t so easily divert things back onto the central message of the campaign. You have to answer them.”

Presidents as diverse as Ronald Reagan, whose Administration excelled at the art, and Jimmy Carter, whose Administration did not, could attest that sending a clear message about one’s intentions and priorities is central to what a President does.

“Being a public official is essentially communicating in a consistent fashion,” said Clinton scheduling chief Susan Thomases, a longtime friend of the President-elect and his wife, Hillary. “Having a message and communicating it clearly is what it’s all about.”

To try to send a clear message, Clinton’s aides scripted three separate public events Wednesday for his first visit to Washington: the meeting with Bush, a stroll along a commercial street in a largely black city neighborhood and an evening speech by Hillary Clinton to the Children’s Defense Fund--the advocacy group whose board she chaired until earlier this year.

Today’s plans will bring another symbolic meeting--Clinton’s first trip to Capitol Hill to meet with both Democratic and Republican leaders of Congress.

Each of the events, aides say, has been designed to project a different facet of the overall theme.

The meeting with Bush was intended to convey in the clearest terms the transfer of presidential power. The walk on city streets was to reinforce the image of Clinton as an accessible and open President interested in the problems of average Americans. The speech showed Hillary Clinton in a favorable setting but, because it took place after television news deadlines, would not detract from the President-elect’s own activities.

And the meeting today on Capitol Hill, Clinton aides hope, will convey to Americans a sense that he is willing to “go the extra step” to break the Washington gridlock and seek bipartisan solutions to the nation’s problems.

That coordination between the schedule and the message was the sort of thing at which Clinton’s campaign excelled during the fall. For all that is said and written about the media’s role in setting the agenda for the nation’s political discourse, the Clinton camp realized early on that during a campaign, the press to a large extent is willing to allow the candidates to decide what issues they want to fight over and which ones they will mutually decide to leave aside.

But in the messy period between the election and the inauguration--as the Clinton team has discovered--the winner quickly finds his agenda being shuffled from outside, as interest groups, foreign governments and other political leaders scramble to bring influence to bear on the shaping of a new Administration.

At times even the telephone system has seemed to conspire against a smooth-running operation, as harried Clinton aides moved into new offices over the weekend, only to discover that suddenly--because of changed numbers and scrambled wiring--no one knew any more how to reach out and touch anybody else.

“The campaign was like an old flannel shirt that you were so used to you felt you could get right up every morning and do almost anything in it. It just felt right,” said a senior Clinton aide. “Now, this is more like buying a new pair of shoes, they just don’t feel right for the first few days.”

“You guys keep coming at us every day with stuff that we’re just not ready to talk about yet,” another key Clinton aide complained to a reporter Tuesday, a statement that summed up much of the Clinton team’s dilemma even as it echoed complaints made by Bush aides four years earlier.

For many in the Clinton team, the difficulties of controlling the message in the transition period have come to be symbolized by the pile of headlines generated over the past two weeks by the issue of gays in the military.

At times, Clinton aides have seemed almost bewildered at the intense scrutiny the issue has received, noting repeatedly to reporters that Clinton’s statements on the issue merely repeated things he said on several occasions during the campaign.

But, they concede, with the transition not yet generating news of its own--at least until Wednesday--Clinton has been largely at the mercy of issues that others would like him to focus on.

“There’s a lot less subject to our control now,” Stephanopoulos said. “Until the work of the transition is far enough along that we’re making news of our own, we’ve got very little to say but a lot of reporters looking for things to do.”