Targeting Clinton’s Risk Is Risky Business for Bush : Campaign: President faces uphill battle in bid to paint his rival as a change worse than no change at all.

Stability is risk.

That’s not Orwellian Newspeak. It’s the daunting dynamic in public opinion facing President Bush as he tries to catch Democrat Bill Clinton, key strategists in both campaigns believe.

Bush hopes to overtake Clinton, who holds a double-digit lead in most national surveys, largely by convincing voters the Arkansas governor is too risky to entrust with the presidency. But some in both campaigns believe that voter discontent has enormously complicated Bush’s task.

This year, they argue, the usual definition of risk has been inverted: Voters are so unhappy with the nation’s course that many consider it a greater risk to maintain the status quo than to change. That means they may be able to accept more doubts about Clinton before dismissing him as too risky.

“Voters are willing to take a higher risk this year than normal,” acknowledges one Republican strategist close to Bush’s campaign. “They are willing to roll the dice.”

Neither side believes this impatient public attitude has left Clinton immune to questions about his character, experience and stature. Clinton supporters remain worried that doubts about his credibility--currently sparked by lingering questions about his efforts to avoid service in the Vietnam War--could erode his support. Indeed, after two weeks dominated by questions about the draft, a Gallup poll released Friday showed a small increase in the percentage of voters questioning Clinton’s integrity.

Says one senior adviser to Clinton: “Right now, (voters) think George Bush and four more years are a greater risk than Clinton. But it’s a dynamic situation, and that could change.”

At the moment, though, there are clear indications that the public is displaying much less aversion to the risk argument when thinking about who will sit in the Oval Office.

The first sign of that shift in voter sentiment may have been the geyser of excitement earlier this year for the prospective independent candidacy of Ross Perot, whose lack of government experience and fuzzy policy positions didn’t deter millions of supporters. It is equally revealing that two months after Perot decided not to enter the race--thereby demonstrating the mercurial temperament that his critics warned of--up to a fifth of the electorate say they remain willing to support him if he storms back in.

The tilt toward risking change also came through in a national poll for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal released Friday. When asked what worried them more, 35% of those surveyed said the possibility that “Bill Clinton will do too much and end up hurting the country,” but 46% said they were more concerned that Bush would “do too little.”

“If things are bad enough, the identity of the challenger matters very little,” says American University historian Allan J. Lichtman, who has written extensively on the keys to winning the presidency.

Another factor may be diluting the public’s traditional caution in measuring potential presidents: the end of the Cold War and the nuclear threat that defined it. Voters still overwhelmingly prefer Bush when asked who would better handle a crisis, but in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, less than 1 in 12 respondents said the President’s priority should be dealing with national security and foreign policy.

“You just can’t underestimate the importance of the end of the Cold War,” says one senior Administration official. “It just makes the presidential race much more like a gubernatorial race--where people say get rid of the old guy, try the new guy, take a chance because we can survive a crummy new guy for four years. People didn’t use to think they could afford a crummy President for four years.”

All of these considerations don’t mean that Bush cannot ultimately portray Clinton as too risky, but it does suggest that the President will have to clear a higher bar to make that argument stick, strategists on both sides say.

That virtually guarantees the Bush campaign will be forced to paint the Democrat in the darkest possible hues, as both the President and his chief spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, sought to do this week.

“The risk strategy,” says one campaign official, “has really got to up the ante.”

The official said three broad questions top the GOP list for hitting Clinton: “his proposed policies, his record in Arkansas and the whole character question.”

Inside and outside the campaign, most expect the unresolved questions about Clinton’s explanations for avoiding the draft--linked to a broader attack on his trustworthiness--to figure heavily in an initial wave of Bush advertisements expected next week that target the Democrat.

The argument, the official said, is likely to be that Clinton “hasn’t been honest about the draft, he hasn’t been honest about a lot of things, he tries to have things both ways, he’s a pure politician.”

In pressing these attacks, though, Bush faces something of a conundrum. Because many voters appear willing to accept Clinton even with some reservations, Bush has to portray him and his programs in the most frightening terms. But the more exaggerated the caricature, the easier it may be for Clinton to deflate it.

The 1980 presidential race offers a precedent for that. Democrat Jimmy Carter--like Bush, an embattled incumbent--worked ferociously to deepen doubts about his challenger. His campaign tried to depict Ronald Reagan as tired, old and unqualified--not to mention a trigger-happy nuclear cowboy who might incinerate the planet.

But Carter’s concentration on demonizing Reagan made it easier for the Republican to efface the portrait by appearing reasonable and non-threatening when the two men debated late in the campaign. The race, which had been tight, opened up after the debate and Reagan cruised to victory. “When he got to the debate, it quelled a lot of the doubts about him,” recalls Gerald Rafshoon, Carter’s media adviser in 1980.

Several sources say the lesson of the 1980 debate hasn’t been lost on White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, a top Reagan campaign aide at the time. Some Republicans believe the White House has held up this year’s suggested round of debates partly to deny Clinton an opportunity to rebut the GOP charges against him by appearing competent and cogent on the same stage with the President. “That’s a tricky matter, and it might be influencing the debate strategy,” said one GOP operative in close contact with the White House.

Rafshoon and others maintain Bush faces a second hurdle in raising voter anxiety about Clinton. They contend that the issues on which voters may feel deceived by Clinton, such as how he handled the draft, are less directly relevant to them than the issue on which they feel Bush broke his word: his promise not to raise taxes.

For many observers, these various considerations lead back to the same point: It’s difficult for an incumbent President to make the race a referendum on his challenger. One sign of that is that in the history of the Gallup poll, no President has received a share of the vote more than five percentage points higher than his average approval rating in the year before the election. Bush’s average approval rating this year has sunk below 40%.

“Politics does sometimes lead you to the devil you don’t know,” worries one Republican strategist. “Voters have possessive feelings about elected officials, which is that if you do something bad you should be punished.”

Even so, like most Republicans, this strategist believes Bush’s best hope is that the typical American caution about change reasserts itself in the campaign’s last hours and causes enough voters to conclude that Clinton’s program and character are both too risky.

Few Democrats are sanguine that voters have reached conclusions so firm about Clinton they can’t be rattled with a barrage of critical ads and more revelations in the press.