Detour Back to Politics a Blow to Baker : Friendship: He ‘hates’ move from diplomat to campaign handler, aide says.

WASHINGTON —  This wasn’t the way James A. Baker III wanted to end his career as a statesman.

Only 10 weeks ago he was dealing with presidents and foreign ministers, mediating between Israel and the Arabs, a serious candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Last Sunday, he was sitting uncomfortably on a folding chair on a hillside in Billings, Mont., listening to voters ask George Bush about schools and gun control.

A Montanan approached Baker and tried to start a conversation, but the White House chief of staff, notoriously averse to pressing the flesh, retreated toward his command post in a nearby Winnebago.

Too bad--for a few minutes later, Bush sought to praise his best friend and comrade-in-arms for his part in winning the Cold War.

“I don’t know whether he’s standing around modestly in the background,” the President said, his eyes darting around the grassy stage, “but our secretary of state, now with me in the White House, Jim Baker . . . where is he?”

This presidential campaign has been like that for Baker. Once the most powerful secretary of state in a generation, he has been reduced to a mere campaign chief at the mercy of all the uncontrollable elements an election year can offer, from a volatile, vengeful electorate to a moody candidate and a fratricidal party.

Billed as a political wizard who could reverse the fortunes of any lagging candidate, Baker is now catching some blame for everything that has gone wrong in the campaign--for decisions he made and decisions he didn’t, for being too visible and not visible enough.

The litany, from other GOP professionals: Baker failed to warn Bush that his domestic inaction was costing him support, he waited too long before joining the campaign, he failed to seize control of the convention, his team of “policy wonks” produced an over-complex program that sailed over voters’ heads, he failed to bring focus to the campaign until the final weeks, he encouraged Bush’s pursuit of a demeaning and--worse--ineffective attack on Bill Clinton’s student visit to Moscow.

Much of the criticism is undoubtedly unfair. Some is leveled by people who bear equal or greater responsibility for campaign failings. All of the sniping is anonymous because--at least for now--Baker is still the second most powerful man in Washington and, even if Bush is defeated, will remain a man no one crosses lightly.

Baker’s partisans say the fact that Bush is within striking distance of winning at all is testimony to Jim Baker’s industry and skill. When Baker and his aides marched the five blocks from the State Department to the White House in mid-August, they found a presidential staff that was “dysfunctional, unbelievably dysfunctional,” said a Baker aide who made the shift. At one strategy meeting, White House aides grandly produced maps of the nation’s congressional districts--and then discovered that they were the wrong maps, left over from 1988.

But none of these individual issues annoys Baker as much as the nature of the debate. This proud and prickly Texas aristocrat who wants to be judged as a statesman is worried that his epitaph may be engraved as a campaign manager--a “handler,” a “political hack,” in the words of his closest aides.

“He hates that, just hates it,” said one.

So visceral is Baker’s response to those labels that it led him to lose his legendary control over his own spin. His first public appearance after moving to the White House was the unenviable job of praising Bush’s dispiriting performance in the first debate on Oct. 11. When asked how much blame he deserved if Bush were to lose, Baker replied: “I don’t know. Maybe a lot. The White House chief of staff is just that, though. The White House chief of staff is not the campaign chairman.”

The disclaimer enraged other campaign executives and revived the oft-laid charge that Baker looks out for himself before he looks out for his candidate. “What I can’t forgive is that these people put their personal interest ahead of the President’s,” one campaign official complained.

In the end, that charge, too, seems unfair. Baker knows he can’t detach his fortunes from Bush’s; the two men are stuck with each other, surrogate brothers bound forever by ties of class, temperament, personal history and, yes, affection. “If we lose the election, I’ll take a lot of the blame--and I’ll accept that,” Baker said recently.

And so, in the final week, his vision of a Nobel Prize only a memory, the Bush Administration’s Mr. Inside climbed aboard the campaign plane and went back to the gritty, squalid old craft he hoped he had left behind: delivering the spin to reporters behind the rope line, calming the candidate, punching away at the negatives, pumping out the message.

“We started this together in 1978,” said one aide, recalling Baker’s first campaign with Bush. “It’s only right to finish it that way.”

In Washington, personal relationships are the hidden nexus of politics, the secret factor that often determines who has power and who does not. And of all the tangled relationships in this city, the bond between Bush and Baker may be the most intriguing.

“It’s a big brother/little brother relationship,” offers a man who has worked closely with both. “There is this unbelievable closeness. There is a degree of competition. And there is a certain defensiveness because of that.”

They have been partners for three decades, ever since they won the doubles championship at their Houston tennis club. Bush succored Baker when the Houston lawyer’s first wife died in 1970, brought him into politics, got him his first job in Washington.

Baker managed Bush’s abortive campaign for President in 1980 and his successful but ugly campaign against the hapless Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. The morning after Election Day, Baker got his reward: secretary of state.

Together, Bush and Baker won worldwide praise for their deft handling of foreign policy in a time of upheaval, from the collapse of communism to the Persian Gulf War. But then the domestic economy turned sour--and Bush’s popularity plummeted.

For all of 1991, Baker was consumed by the delicate and exhausting negotiations that led to his greatest achievement, the opening of Arab-Israeli peace talks. He may have advised Bush that the Administration’s domestic side badly needed fixing, officials said, but he never offered a plan, never suggested that anyone be fired.

“With 20/20 hindsight, maybe it would have been a good thing” if he had done something, a knowledgeable official said, “but he didn’t.”

By last July, when Bush was 25 points behind Clinton in the polls, Washington was full of rumors that he would call on Baker for help. But for weeks, Bush didn’t raise the issue, officials said, and Baker--who wanted to stay at the State Department--didn’t either.

Finally, Bush’s political fortunes grew so bad that the silence had to be broken. The two men retreated to Baker’s Wyoming ranch. On the first day, Bush still didn’t mention the campaign, an aide said. But on the second day, he did.

“George Bush is a proud man also,” a White House official said. “Everybody knows how painful it was for the President to ask him.”

Almost immediately, Baker announced his resignation as secretary of state and moved to the White House with his four top aides: political operatives Margaret Tutwiler and Janet Mullins and policy wizards Robert B. Zoellick and Dennis Ross. They walked into a White House and a campaign in chaos.

The Republican Convention, counted on for a boost, had turned into what one official called “a debacle” after the party’s right wing dominated television coverage with ferocious speeches about “family values.”

And the White House policy machinery was paralyzed. In their first week on the job, Hurricane Andrew flattened much of South Florida. Baker won wide praise by scrambling Bush to Miami immediately with promises of federal aid. But then the aid didn’t come. “We pulled the levers and nothing happened,” one of his lieutenants said. “Things didn’t work the way they did at the State Department.”

Within a few weeks, Baker had the White House--and the campaign--running more smoothly. “We knew far more clearly our marching orders,” said one holdover from the old regime. “But it’s like they couldn’t move fast enough--like playing catch-up in a marathon (from) 20 miles back.”

Baker and his staff cranked out a series of policy decisions on issues that had been logjammed for months: a Republican proposal on “family leave” to counter a Democratic bill, a compromise on ethanol production that pleased Midwest farmers, jet fighter sales to Saudi Arabia and Taiwan that meant jobs for Texas and Missouri.

They produced a speech that pulled together all the domestic initiatives Bush planned for his second term: 13 proposals, from the GOP health care plan and school choice vouchers to tax cuts and congressional term limits.

The speech, given in Detroit, was the proof that Bush did have a domestic program, after all. It won wide praise in the newspapers. But it didn’t make a dent on the voters.

“It was too complicated,” complained one non-Baker aide. “Who can remember 13 ideas at once?”

But a campaign official had another explanation: “You had no follow-through. You needed major figures going out to reinforce the message. . . . It should have been Jim Baker. Having his stamp on it would have given it so much credibility.”

Baker didn’t want to stump in public for the plan. One official was told Baker didn’t want to give speeches using the campaign’s projections of how much Clinton’s tax plan would hit the middle class--that he “might have to distance himself from it.” That struck some in the campaign as disloyal.

But Baker aides denied that and said the reason was at once simpler and more complicated: Baker, the younger brother, didn’t want to upstage Bush, the candidate.

Also, one official said, “He does not want to be seen as a pol.”

That, however, was a losing struggle. In September, Baker masterminded the jockeying with the Clinton campaign over presidential debates, briefly seizing the initiative for Bush. At the same time, he ordered escalating attacks on Clinton’s character and veracity--the one factor that drew a clear response from “focus groups” of ordinary voters.

Bush took up a charge, first laid by conservatives in Congress, that Clinton had been unpatriotic by protesting the Vietnam War in London and visiting the Soviet Union. The attack backfired, drawing criticism toward Bush.

In 1988, Baker escaped blame for Bush’s negative campaign against Dukakis. This time, he was caught in the middle. Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham (R-San Diego) described an Oval Office meeting at which Baker encouraged the conservatives to continue their attacks and laughed at his comparison of Clinton to Tokyo Rose.

“I don’t remember laughing,” Baker said stonily a few days later. “But if I did, I laughed because it was such a joke.”

Baker himself was becoming an issue--and it only got worse. In the first presidential debate, Bush announced that he would name his chief of staff “coordinator” of domestic policy in a second term. Later, a White House aide said Baker would give a major speech explaining the idea.

To Baker’s discomfort, the gambit backfired. Columnists renewed the old image of Baker as “deputy President.” Clinton derided Bush for handing his presidency over to an appointed aide.

“It didn’t take us 36 hours to see what we had to do,” a White House aide sighed. Baker’s speech was unceremoniously canceled. Bush delivered the message instead.

Now, in the homestretch, Baker has joined his candidate on the road, barnstorming the mountain states and the Midwest. Reporters have been told that his very presence proves Bush still has a chance to win; after all, Baker wouldn’t allow himself to be seen anywhere near a losing cause.

In the end, there may have been little Baker could do. “The central limit of this campaign is not Jim Baker but George Bush--what’s in George Bush’s head and soul,” Republican consultant Doug Bailey observed. In other words, it may be Bush who has let Baker down, not the other way around.

If George Bush wins, Baker gets what he wants: a return to the State Department after a year or so pushing the new domestic agenda through Congress. If Bush loses, Baker is unemployed at 62.

In that event, some Baker-watchers expect him to develop a career as a bipartisan Washington super lawyer.

Times staff writers Geraldine Baum, James Gerstenzang and Douglas Jehl contributed to this story.