Is White House Now Gunning for Reno? : Politics: The attorney general’s public popularity has intensified her independence. But the Administration has many ways to keep her in line.

WASHINGTON â€”  Where does an 800-pound attorney general sit? Anywhere she wants, of course. The Clinton Administration has certainly found this to be the rule governing its relations with its popular but difficult Cabi net member, Janet Reno.

Just a few months ago, it suited President Bill Clinton’s purposes to present Reno as a salt-of-the-earth, law-enforcement hero. She became extremely popular. But now some people in the Clinton White House and Justice Department seem to have decided they do not like her after all; and they are organizing themselves into a demolition crew to undo the stellar image some of them helped create.

You will recall the dire straits into which the President fell in his search for a woman attorney general. His first nominee, Zoe Baird, was torpedoed by opponents who called her too pro-business and by revelations that she had hired an illegal immigrant to care for her son and failed to pay the woman’s Social Security taxes. Baird’s near-successor, Kimba M. Wood, was felled by that same dread curse of the alien nanny.

The Administration was called amateurish for not spotting the trouble and elitist for knowing only women who could afford nannies for their children. People said the attorney-general fiasco was a bad portent for the Administration’s future.

When Reno finally turned up, the President and his spokespersons positively beamed. The search had been bedeviled by scandal, and Reno was clean. In contrast with previous candidates, she was not slim, stylish and cosmopolitan but big, plain and down-home. She had few direct ties to the yucky private sector. While she had the advantage of being a woman, she also enjoyed an absence of children, in whose behalf parents regularly and readily sacrifice all sorts of public responsibilities.

True, Reno came with problems. She had not yet trod the national stage, so it was hard to get an accurate idea of her politics. As a local prosecutor, she had no experience in federal law enforcement, let alone in giving the kind of advice a President needs from an attorney general.

These drawbacks did not seem to weigh heavily on Clinton or his aides. They said Reno was so famous as a tough prosecutor that she was named in a rap song. They said her mother wrestled alligators. They basked in her plain-spokenness.

They talked as if they were giving us Tom Dewey with a Southern accent and skirt.

So now they’ve got her--and some of them don’t like her, for wholly predictable reasons.

She is a stranger to the Clinton circle. Yet by law, she controls a policy area about which prominent Clinton supporters--lawyers all--feel fiercely proprietary. So there is tension over who will control political appointments in the Justice Department. Important jobs go unfilled, and it is hard to make policy.

Because Reno is also an outsider to federal law enforcement, she has been tentative in her early decisions. She was slow to remove FBI Director William S. Sessions after he had been accused of improprieties. She has wavered on the Crown Heights affair, in which a Jew was murdered by an African-American during racial and ethnic rioting. She has displeased both those who want federal action and Administration strategists who would like the whole affair to disappear and stop embarrassing their ally, New York Mayor David N. Dinkins.

In another mark of the outsider, Reno has relied--for good and for ill--on the experts in her enforcement agencies. Trusting the FBI, she made the wrong decision in the standoff in Waco, Texas. When Vice President Al Gore’s “reinventing government� initiative proposed merging the FBI with the Drug Enforcement Agency, Reno killed the idea. She was probably right, but the decision provided another cause for White House resentment.

The attorney general has also lurched leftward in areas where the Administration does not want to look soft. When Clinton dropped Justice Department nominee C. Lani Guinier over the issue of racial quotas, Reno supported her. The President’s chief law-enforcement officer talks about fighting crime through neonatal care and curbing TV violence at a time when many citizens are seriously mulling the idea of having violent criminals dropped from helicopters into shark-infested waters.

In olden days, when bureaucratic wars were waged more quietly, opponents might have neutralized an attorney general like Reno by simply asserting White House authority over her, directly or through allies in the Justice Department itself. Clintonites have indeed tried this.

But as the country has moved away from old-style politics, the press and opinion leaders are less tolerant of political authorities, even Presidents, who dictate actions to duly appointed officials. So an Administration cannot count on private pressures to control a Cabinet member--let alone a figure with Reno’s public reputation.

As the political climate shifted, political weapons adapted. It became far more common for a high official’s adversaries to do their demolition work by fomenting public accusations, sometimes well-founded, about the official’s financial or sexual wrongdoing. Thus began our current wave of political scandal, which has yet to claim its last Cabinet member.

But our politics has adapted to this change, too. In his hunt for an attorney general, Clinton belatedly but ultimately learned his lesson. In choosing Reno, he settled on a candidate whose most conspicuous virtues were that she was non-elite and conspicuously clean. There is, however, a drawback: Reno’s critics in the White House and among politically active Democratic lawyers may now find her increasingly tedious, but they know they will not be able to oust her by unearthing a skeleton in her closet.

So here they are, with an attorney general beloved by the public and free of moral taint. They are, as we say, stuck.

Well, not quite. Last week, the New York Times ran a long article faithfully reporting on the talk now buzzing around Washington about Reno. The word on her, after her first six months in office, is that she is incompetent. Career officials impatient with her indecisiveness are saying this. But so are Clinton appointees and allies--the ones you might expect to hear defending Reno and the good that her reputation among the masses has done for the President.

This sort of denigration won’t affect Reno’s public image for a while. But the talk will make it harder for her to start performing more effectively in Washington. The charges against her are not wholly true, but they may well be self-fulfilling.

The worry about “competence� is a serious one. In Reno’s case, though, this professed worry about the quality of her performance would be more persuasive if the people now expressing it had shown more concern for professional quality when they searched for their attorney general in the first place. As things are, we may now be seeing a classic case of an Administration’s getting exactly the problems of governance it deserves.