Will the Real Bill Clinton Please Stand Up : Image: Conventions are a study in contrasts. Democrats see a moderate voice for change. GOP paints him as ‘slick,’ big-spending liberal.

The Bill Clinton that voters met at the Democratic Convention in New York was the hard-working son of a single mother, who learned more from his small-town grandfather than from any textbook, who has worked to lift up his impoverished state and who is moving the Democratic Party away from the liberal orthodoxies of its past.

The Bill Clinton on display at the Republican Convention here is quite a different fellow.

He is the “failed governor of a small state,” says Republican National Committee Chairman Richard N. Bond.

He is a “slick” liberal who “sat up in a dormitory in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft,” says Patrick J. Buchanan.

He is a big spender who has proposed “the largest tax increase in the nation’s history,” one that will cost “millions of Americans . . . their jobs,” says Texas Sen. Phil Gramm.

If the top priority at the Republican Convention is improving voters’ attitudes about President Bush, close behind is the need to take Democrats’ portrayal of Bill Clinton--and turn it on its head.

At their convention last month, the Democrats framed the race as a choice between change and the status quo: a ticket of young, vigorous moderates with a plan for reviving the economy battling a tired incumbent who lacks vision, an agenda and the will to act.

The Republicans are working hard this week to reverse those contrasts. Where Democrats portrayed Clinton and running mate Al Gore as fresh and new, Republicans are trying to redefine them as inexperienced.

What Democrats sold as moderation, Republicans are recasting as stealth liberalism. Above all, what Democrats pictured as change, Republicans are seeking to portray as risk--a future that looks suspiciously like the days of malaise and Jimmy Carter.

“At the New York convention, Clinton was like a used-car salesman peddling his vehicle for change,” Gramm said in his keynote address Tuesday night. “But when you look under the hood, you discover he is hawking a model from the ‘70s--a Carter-mobile with the axle broken and the frame bent to the left.”

As presented during the convention’s first two days, the GOP case against Clinton sprawls across many issues--from taxes to the environment to crime--and touches on questions about his character, his qualifications to conduct foreign policy and the legal writings of his wife, Hillary Clinton. Even some insiders complain that the campaign hasn’t yet distilled its Clinton critique into a concise indictment.

“There is no particularly airtight master plan,” acknowledged one insider.

Amid this sometimes confusing barrage of accusations, though, some clear priorities for the Republicans are emerging.

At the top of the list is challenging Clinton’s attempt to claim the political center by linking him to liberal Democratic approaches that voters have rejected in the past. That’s a familiar tactic for the Bush forces: Four years ago, Bush regained control of the presidential race by painting Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis as a cultural elitist contemptuous of middle-American values.

This time, some senior Bush officials acknowledge, it won’t be as easy to polarize the race ideologically because Clinton--a death-penalty supporter and advocate of welfare reform--does not present as tempting a cultural target as Dukakis. But, GOP strategists say, crucial to their hope of staging a comeback is increasing the percentage of Americans who say that Clinton is too liberal--now only about one in five, according to the latest Times Poll.

“If we don’t do anything else out of the convention, if we don’t do anything else in the general election, we have to show the difference between Republican and Democratic principles--because it’s become blurred,” said Mary Matalin, the Bush campaign’s political director.

To push Clinton to the left, Republicans are pinning their hopes primarily on accusations that the Arkansas governor offers a return to traditional Democratic policies of “tax and spend.” Exhibit A is the charge that the $150 billion in revenue-raising proposals in Clinton’s economic plan would represent the largest tax increase in history.

In response, Clinton aides maintain that when the plan’s roughly $100 billion in offsetting tax cuts for middle-class families and business are figured in, Clinton’s net tax increase is smaller than many others--including the five-year, $145-billion increase that Bush signed as part of the 1990 budget deal.

Republicans counter that Clinton’s tally doesn’t include potential new levies on business to fund Clinton’s health care and job training initiatives.

Republicans have tried to fill in their portrayal of Clinton as a closet leftist by labeling him an environmental extremist who would unleash waves of new regulation and wipe out jobs. And they are challenging his claim that he represents mainstream social values--the cornerstone of his defense against the Republican ideological attacks.

In a speech to a “God and Country” rally on Monday, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson disparaged Clinton’s frequent references to the Bible in his acceptance speech: “Just because someone quotes Scripture . . . does not make him a man who stands for the values we stand for.”

Beyond the ideological assault, Republicans are rapping the Democrat’s record at home--another tactic that proved successful four years ago. Clinton tried to minimize his vulnerability to such assaults in his acceptance speech by declaring there was no “Arkansas miracle”--just modest progress on difficult problems.

Few here would grant him even that. In his speech, Gramm declared that Clinton’s “failed leadership” has left Arkansas in last place on an array of concerns from average family income to environmental policy.

In other addresses Tuesday, California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren accused Clinton of failing to adequately fund law enforcement; Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan accused him of mismanaging his state’s health care system.

Both of these charges--that Clinton is a liberal in moderate garb, that his record at home does not match his rhetoric--address the same deeper objective, many analysts say. In both cases, the Republicans--hoping to revive earlier doubts about Clinton’s integrity--are arguing that voters cannot trust an opponent whom many regularly label “slick.”

Reinforcing that effort to raise doubts about Clinton has been a regular series of references to the personal controversies that nearly engulfed Clinton’s campaign earlier this year. They range from Ronald Reagan’s allusion to Clinton’s assertion that he “didn’t inhale” when sampling marijuana as a college student to comments by two GOP aides about the allegations of marital infidelity lodged against the Democratic nominee.

But Democrats insist that after the reversal of his “no new taxes” pledge two years ago, Bush cannot win an election fought on the terrain of trust. “That is the greatest betrayal in recent times of the American public’s trust,” said Frank Greer, one of Clinton’s media consultants. “So it is going to be pretty hard for them to run on trust.”