Clinton Fights for the Prize--but Not a Mandate for Change : As front-runner, he avoids risk of alienating voters by not spelling out hard answers to hard economic problems. But the strategy could be costly.

“One of the worst things we ever did for George Bush was let him get elected without a plan for what he would do as President,” Bill Clinton used to claim early in his presidential campaign. “We let George Bush get elected on the cheap . . . on ‘read my lips’ and ‘the other guy’s a bum.’ ”

But as Election Day nears with the Democratic nominee the man to beat in the race, Clinton rarely uses that line anymore. Increasingly, his own performance on the hustings is causing scholars and politicians to worry that he is following in Bush’s 1988 footsteps--waging a campaign designed to bring him a electoral majority, but not a clear mandate for governing.

Not that Bush is doing any better in 1992 in that regard than Clinton, in the view of most analysts. Those who doubt that Clinton’s soak-the-rich tax plan will do much to reduce the huge federal budget deficit, for example, are downright derisive of Bush’s promised across-the-board cut in tax rates.

Whichever candidate wins, says veteran Democratic strategist Ted Van Dyke, “he’ll have to start off his inaugural address by saying: ‘I lied.’ Neither one of them is building a public mandate for what he is going to have to do next January.”

And the widespread dissatisfaction with the reluctance of both of the major party candidates to outline the hard answers that the nation’s profound economic problems seem to require is underlined by the re-emergence of Ross Perot, who is expected to officially announce his candidacy this week.

Economists disagree about the merits of the Texas billionaire’s harsh prescriptions for the nation’s economic ills. But most observers credit him with being more forthright than either Clinton or Bush about the difficulties that the country faces.

“People know in their common sense that neither one of these guys (Bush and Clinton) are telling the truth about economic renewal and what needs to be done,” Van Dyke says.

Clinton, the clear front-runner in the race since the mid-summer Democratic Convention, has generated high expectations for himself by promising that his presidency would bring dramatic change in the government. So it is the Democratic challenger’s utterances that now are being most closely measured against the realities he would face in the Oval Office.

In the judgment of many, Clinton is taking a long-term gamble with his prospective presidency because he wants to avoid the shorter run risk of revealing proposed solutions that might cost him votes.

“There is a grave risk in not defining more clearly how he is going to meet what will be the major challenge he faces” as chief executive, says Charles O. Jones, a University of Wisconsin authority on the modern presidency. “But I think he thinks at this point that winning is more important than governing.”

The main element of the case against Clinton is that he will not be able to keep his promises to reduce the deficit, renovate the infrastructure and reform health care and education, without asking for more severe belt tightening that will impinge upon the lives of millions of voters.

If Clinton wins in November, “I think what he’ll have is a mandate for change that’s ill-defined,” worries his erstwhile rival for the Democratic nomination, former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas. “And the question will be, ‘If you haven’t talked about these various things in detail in the campaign what do you do in January?’ ”

The particular problem Clinton will face, Tsongas believes, will be winning support on Capitol Hill for the tough-minded measures he will need to implement change. “How do you move the Congress if you haven’t used the campaign to eliminate some of their political fears by demonstrating that you can do the right thing without committing political suicide?”

Clinton’s current caution about forging a mandate is only the latest illustration of a prolonged dilemma centering on the presidency. This conundrum has contributed greatly to many of the failures of recent presidents and to the consequent disenchantment of the electorate.

Numerous factors have shaped the mandate dilemma, some deeply rooted in the structure of the political system. The constitutional separation of powers pits Congress against the President and can lead to gridlock, hindering a President from fulfilling promises made as a candidate. Also, political parties have weakened, making the proposing and implementing of a public policy agenda more difficult.

In recent years, political consultants--hired guns as they are known in the trade--have played a larger role in campaigns, which “has had the effect of divorcing the way we elect our leaders from the way they govern,” says American University political scientist Allan J. Lichtman. “So campaigns have become almost irrelevant to governing.”

Democratic insiders concede that under the pressure of the campaign, Clinton has often seemed to spend more time responding to Bush than putting forth a clear message of what he proposes to do.

“I think all these people (Clinton strategists) are very nervous about getting into too much detail for fear that it would come back to haunt them either after the election or during the election,” said one senior adviser to the nominee.

But the Arkansas governor’s performance on the presidential campaign stump also has been influenced by the pragmatism developed during the nearly 20 years he has spent seeking and holding office.

“He’s a cautious guy whose whole career has been built around avoiding controversial issues unless he absolutely couldn’t,” said Democratic pollster Tom Kiley, an adviser to Michael S. Dukakis’ ill-fated 1988 presidential campaign.

Recalling how Dukakis’ early lead over Bush vanished four years ago, Kiley acknowledges that such prudence is understandable, “especially if you’re a Democrat and you’ve been conditioned from almost birth to expect things to slip away in October.”

Thus, as he stumps across the land, Clinton often calls on voters to “have the courage” to change the country, as he did Sunday at a rally in Indianola, Iowa. But he rarely mentions the word “sacrifice.”

To the contrary, in Indianola he promised his audience in the Farm Belt, long dependent on federal support for agriculture, that, unlike Bush, he would as President “put government on your side.”

And though he prides himself as “a different kind of Democrat” on his willingness to challenge the party’s traditional constituencies, often he winds up sounding eager to please all sides. Last week, while addressing a rally in Portland, Ore., he described himself as “pro-growth and pro-environment . . . pro-business and pro-working families.”

Asked at a meeting with Times editors and reporters during the summer about his reluctance to call for sacrifice, Clinton referred to the “assumption abroad in the land” that the only way to reduce the budget deficit “is to punish the middle class and lower middle class. I don’t believe that. I have told everybody who will listen that it takes courage to change, I’m not talking about sacrifice.”

Clinton did say that no President could do much to change the national condition, “unless people are willing to change their private conduct, too. Unless there is a real commitment to higher productivity in the private sector, unless every middle-class American is willing to change their behavior in the workplace, commit themselves to a lifetime of education and training.”

But critics doubt that private conduct can pave the way for the changes Clinton has promised unless backed by fundamental shifts in federal policy requiring various groups to make at least short-term concessions in the long-term national interest.

Some Democrats contend that Clinton’s caution will be justified if it can help him win by a whopping margin, the size of which itself would help provide a mandate for change. But recent history suggests that even landslides have their limitations as mandates.

In 1964, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson overwhelmed Republican Barry Goldwater with a campaign generally founded on crowd-pleasing generalizations. But within two years after his victory, Johnson’s presidency was on the skids because of controversy over his Great Society programs, which he had discussed only in a hazy outline during the campaign, and mounting opposition to his escalation of the Vietnam War, of which he had given no hint at all.

Nor does the announcement of a popular goal, without spelling out the means required to achieve it, amount to a satisfactory mandate. Richard M. Nixon’s promise to end the Vietnam War helped him win the presidency in 1968. But the prolonged winding down of the war for which he had not prepared the electorate polarized the country, contributing to a siege mentality in the White House.

The absence of a mandate also plagued Ronald Reagan after his 1980 campaign in which he promised to cut taxes and boost defense spending. But he also promised to balance the budget without cutting Social Security, the largest entitlement program. Reagan got his tax cuts and defense spending increases through Congress, but when the budget deficit burgeoned he had no mandate to cut entitlement spending or take other measures that would have avoided the flood of red ink that became his fiscal legacy.

This dismal record makes some scholars and politicians question whether Clinton could indulge in the candor required to create a realistic mandate without hurting his candidacy critically.

“I think it’s possible,” says University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. “But it would require him to sacrifice some electoral votes and a percent or two of the popular vote. That way he would win a smaller victory but one with a stronger mandate that would allow him to govern.”

“I don’t think there’s a damn thing he could do that wouldn’t cost him votes,” says the University of Wisconsin’s Charles Jones. He suggests that Clinton wait until the closing days of the campaign, when, if victory seemed assured, he could run the risk of spelling out the cost of change to the voters.

Such political risks can sometimes be worth taking, some analysts say.

One President who took that chance was Harry S. Truman, to whom both Bush and Clinton have fought over the right to claim kinship. During his legendary “give-’em-hell” campaign in 1948, “everybody knew what he stood for,” says Truman biographer Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University.

Times staff writers Cathleen Decker and David Lauter contributed to this story.