COLUMN LEFT/ THE DEMOCRATS : Clinton Offers New Mind-Set, World View : Bush’s economic vision is still focused on the wrong priorities. Investment in and for the people will turn the country around.

In a presidency more than 1,300 days old, George Bush found it necessary to arrange a speech Thursday at the Detroit Economic Club and to buy television ads to detail his vision and explain his economic policy to the American people. He acts as if his problems with the economy and the recession have been bad rhetoric and poor packaging. But the reality is different, and his speech offered nothing new.

At a time when Americans need education, skills, health care and leadership at the national level to secure a new prosperity for themselves and their families, the Bush program runs in the opposite direction. The President talks a good game with respect to the need for more investment-oriented activities, but his program doesn’t commit real resources and its priorities are wrong.

It seeks an unfair, untargeted cut in the capital gains tax rate, rather than a program carefully designed to promote additional new investment. It maintains unnecessarily high levels of military spending as a jobs program, while failing to adequately fund conversion programs that would enhance the capacity of the civilian sector to produce the jobs we really need.

It targets much of the federal research and development dollar to outdated Cold War weaponry, not the research we need to remain competitive globally. It offers little new in education, and an overdue, insufficient training program lacking in financing within the current budget.

The Administration cannot deliver what America needs: We need comprehensive economic change. The candidate of change is Bill Clinton, and his program stands in marked contrast to the President’s:

-- The President proposes tax-deductibility for interest on college loans--a good idea at the margin. But Clinton imagines a National Service Trust Fund that would allow Americans to borrow for college and perform a period of public service, if they so chose, to repay their debt.

-- The President is still toying with the Democratic plan to create new jobs by speeding up some infrastructure spending. Clinton imagines much more: a program that would create both roads and a new generation of infrastructure, including a national information network that would link every home in America to public databases, libraries and schools.

-- The President’s major concern about the private sector is that firms are obligated by law to protect the environment and pay some minimum taxes when they earn profits. Clinton imagines a civilian research and development agency that supports cutting-edge projects, while penalizing executives who cut multimillion-dollar sweetheart compensation packages subsidized by the taxpayers as their companies flounder.

-- The President’s health-care proposal would boost the cost of some insurance premiums by 25%. By contrast, Clinton would reform health care through cost containment, generating funds to pay for expanded coverage. He would take on the hospitals, doctors, prescription drug and insurance companies, those that profit from the current breakdown of our health-care system.

These ideas, among others, add up to a new way of managing our economic affairs. They make our priorities clear: We want to invest in the American people; we want to help people help themselves; we will work with companies interested in forging ahead; we will make learning a lifelong task and provide the physical and social infrastructure to do so.

We’re not talking here about just a difference in programs. We’re talking about a difference in world view, of mind-set, of priorities. Ultimately, the Bush program smiles in satisfaction at the status quo and offers our citizens more of the same.

The problems that the economy faces are long term and structural. If we want to revitalize in the short-term and promote healthy and sustainable growth in the long term, we need a credible plan that will engender confidence among investors, consumers, producers and workers that real problems are being addressed.

Bill Clinton’s proposals offer a radical departure from the President’s failed policies. They point this nation toward a new, more productive and prosperous course for the 1990s and beyond. Most of all, they affirm a belief held by Democratic and Republican presidents of the past--that our nation’s chief executive must be the vital, catalytic center of action for our entire government when the country is listing dangerously off course.