ELECTIONS ’92 : As They Point to Future, Bush and Clinton Are Dogged by Past : Campaigns: President is hobbled by doubts about credibility arising from his economic record. The governor is in similar trouble on the draft issue.

As President Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton enter a potentially critical phase of their struggle for the White House, the past is stalking both campaigns.

For Clinton, the shadow from the past is the continuing charge that he has been less than candid in describing his efforts to avoid the draft during Vietnam.

For Bush, the uncomfortable memory is more recent: a first term dominated by meager economic growth and increases in federal spending and taxes. That record looms over the promises he made in Thursday’s speech here to double the economy’s size in the next decade by restraining government and cutting taxes.

Ironically, both men now find themselves confronting the same dilemma, analysts say. Anxious to shift the debate from the past to the future, Bush and Clinton are asking voters to judge them primarily on their plans for reviving the economy. But both are being hobbled by doubts about their credibility rooted in questions about their records.

“They are both in the same situation,” says Republican pollster Ed Goeas. “They would both like to get out their message about the future, and talk about the other’s past. Clinton doesn’t know when another negative story will pop out about his past, and Bush doesn’t know when more negative news will come out on the economy.”

Over the past week, Bush has forced these issues of credibility into sharper focus as he struggles to narrow Clinton’s lead.

With his speech Thursday to the Detroit Economic Club, Bush made his most ambitious effort yet to present his domestic policy proposals as a comprehensive agenda, and restore his tarnished credibility on the economy.

At the same time, his campaign escalated its efforts to undermine Clinton’s credibility by challenging his account of how he avoided service in Vietnam. Clinton’s version of events has come under renewed fire in the wake of a Times story last week detailing efforts by Clinton’s uncle to prevent him from being inducted.

Since then, Republicans have repeatedly massed and fired, with marksmen from Kansas Sen. Bob Dole to a group of Vietnam veterans accusing Clinton of misrepresenting his efforts to avoid the draft. Accompanying these public statements have been daily waves of faxes to reporters from the Bush campaign questioning Clinton’s accounts.

Strategists on both sides believe the barrage is likely to intensify--with attacks perhaps coming from Bush or eventually in the form of Bush television ads challenging Clinton on the issue.

“Compared to the kind of heat we are capable of turning up this is nothing,” says one Bush strategist. “We are trying to escalate it every two or three days: We want this thing to dominate the debate for awhile.”

Both sides see Bush’s double-barreled offensive--on the economy and the draft--as a potential turning point in the campaign. “This campaign could look very interesting in seven days,” says the Bush strategist.

“I accept that this is an important point of engagement,” says Stanley B. Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster. “If the Republicans come out of the next two weeks with no more credibility on the economy and Clinton undiminished, I don’t know what they do next.”

In a sense, both elements of Bush’s offensive constitute an admission that he is unlikely to remove the stone on his chest--the public’s dismal assessment of his economic performance.

Bush aides have conceded those negative views won’t improve much before Election Day. So they have attempted to shift voters’ attention toward the President’s plan for economic recovery and questions about Clinton.

“For Bush,” says conservative economics consultant Jeffrey Bell, “the key question is whether he can make it a future-oriented debate instead of a referendum on his report card.”

Bush’s speech was nothing if not forward-looking. Though the President recognized “the uneasiness” many Americans feel about the economy, he pointed toward a “renewed America” that would “nearly double the size of our economy” by early next century.

More concisely than before, Bush laid out his vision of how to get there: “I want a government that spends less, regulates less and taxes less. And I will fight . . . for a free flow of trade and capital and ideas around the world. . . . “

Bush backers say that agenda offers a sharp contrast with Clinton’s government-oriented proposals to spur recovery. The broader question is to what degree voters will assess Bush’s promises through the prism of his actual performance.

His promise to cut taxes, for example, must overcome the memories of his broken “read-my-lips” promise not to raise taxes.

In office, Bush has been a staunch backer of free trade. But he has allowed domestic spending to rise faster than any President since John F. Kennedy and has overseen a substantial increase in regulation relative to the Ronald Reagan Administration.

Moreover, while promising to cut spending, he has been announcing new spending programs as he campaigns across the country--from a $10-billion job training program to enhanced farm export subsidies. Even his new proposal to cut salaries for top federal employees by 5% jars against his support of a 25% pay increase in 1989.

By contrast, Clinton seemed to enjoy great success over the summer at restoring voters’ confidence in his personal credibility and integrity. With a series of relaxed and intimate appearances on pop culture television programs--and then a convention that lionized his ascent from modest roots--he drew even with Bush on polls measuring honesty and integrity.

Now, however, some Democrats believe the new flurry of questions about his Vietnam-era actions could revive the old doubts. If the ongoing controversy “opens up that wound that was created in the primaries, people could very well snap back to the negative feelings they had toward him,” says Democratic media consultant Joe Trippi.

It was less than three weeks ago when Clinton went before the American Legion in Chicago and offered what he said would be his “final statement” on the draft. But then a Times story revealed that despite Clinton’s assertions that no influence had been used to keep him out of the draft, his uncle had strenuously lobbied to do just that--an effort that included an attempt to secure for Clinton a position in the Naval Reserve.

Clinton initially responded that the report was “all news to me.” Later, though, he acknowledged that he had been told in March about the overture to the Naval Reserve. Asked to square that apparent inconsistency, he said his original response had been to a question not specifically about the Naval Reserve, but on the broader issue of his uncle’s efforts.

This latest verbal tangle came after several recent incidents where Clinton has equivocated on policy issues. He has come under increasing criticism from Bush for not taking a clear position on a proposed free trade agreement with Mexico--though he appears to be edging closer toward outright opposition. And late last month, Clinton appeared to back off from his earlier support for a dramatic increase in automobile fuel efficiency standards--though in language so vague both sides in the dispute could find comfort.

Bush strategists hope that the questions on the draft will cast such policy shuffles in a new light, and cause voters to doubt whether Clinton means to deliver the reforms he promises. “This is the crack in the Hoover Dam that could lead to something,” says the Bush strategist.

It’s not yet clear that the ongoing draft controversy has yet opened such a serious hole in Clinton’s defenses. But if the situation gets much worse, observers in both camps say they wouldn’t be surprised if Clinton tried to deal with the issue directly, perhaps through a television appearance.

Still, the GOP effort to revive doubts about Clinton’s honesty is running against a powerful head wind: overwhelming economic dissatisfaction that is fueling a powerful desire for change.

But Clinton’s forces are battening down for gale-force efforts from the President to reverse that dynamic. When James Carville, Clinton’s senior strategist, was recently asked how rough he expected the campaign to get, he responded with a single word: “Armageddon.”