Clinton Talks Like a Winner, but Warns Against Overconfidence : Politics: The Democrat confirms that he is looking at how to implement his economic plan. His campaign is moving into GOP strongholds in West.

Abandoning the customary superstition and caution of presidential candidates, Democrat Bill Clinton gladly acknowledged his front-runner status Friday even as he called on his supporters to fight against overconfidence as Election Day nears.

The Clinton campaign also exuded a sunny optimism in another way: A senior aide took the unusual step of disclosing the candidate’s travel plans for the next week, detailing a trip that will take the Arkansas governor to Western states often ignored late in the campaign by past Democratic presidential contenders.

In a close race, such tactical information would be tightly guarded as part of efforts to keep the other side off-stride. The disclosure serves to tweak President Bush’s campaign--and to suggest surprising strength for the Democrat in such generally formidable GOP strongholds as Nevada and Wyoming, which are part of Clinton’s itinerary.

Clinton himself urged his supporters to keep working without let-up, telling an audience in Richmond, Va.--perhaps for inspiration, perhaps as a warning--that they need look no further than the unhappy experience of baseball’s Pittsburgh Pirates two nights earlier in the National League championship series.

“Did you remember what happened? A guy’s coming into home, the catcher dropped the ball, last half of the ninth inning,” he said. End of game and--for the Pirates--end of season.

Never mind that he got the details wrong, that the catcher held on to the ball and just missed with the tag. The moral was clear.

“Lesson--it’s not over ‘til it’s over,” Clinton said, lapsing into the sort of abbreviated language of which Bush is so fond. “I need your help.”

Despite his cautions against overconfidence, Clinton summoned reporters for an impromptu news conference to confirm a story in Friday editions of The Times that--based on the assumption he wins the White House--he has asked his advisers to look at ways to revise his economic recovery plan to increase the initial impact he hopes it would have.

He confirmed he was looking ahead to the possibility of needing to push for larger tax cuts and more federal spending than he now proposes in order to jump-start the economy.

Such an approach would increase the federal deficit in the short run, and perhaps make Clinton’s overall debt-reduction plan harder to attain. But Clinton and his advisers may decide that increased stimulus for the economy is a higher priority.

Clinton told reporters he was “really concerned” by recent comments by Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who warned in a speech in Japan that the recession could continue for several more months.

“I think it’s something we need to look at: getting people to work again and getting the incomes up,” Clinton said in discussing the rationale for higher tax cuts and increased federal spending.

Asked if such a plan ran the risk of scaring financial markets, Clinton said: “Absolutely.”

“I think we have to keep these things in very careful balance, and that’s why I haven’t made any decision about that,” he said.

Clinton made his comments shortly before his campaign airplane departed Richmond for Louisiana, where he joined with his running mate, Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee, for their seventh bus tour of the campaign. The pair and their wives met in Baton Rouge, then rode to New Orleans for an evening rally.

At his campaign appearances Friday, Clinton sought to counter Bush’s frequent warnings--repeated by the President during Thursday night’s debate in Richmond--that change can be risky.

Clinton urged his audiences to not be afraid to leave the status quo behind.

But for the time being, the Arkansas governor was making that case in an abbreviated fashion, saving his still-hoarse voice for Monday’s final presidential debate and turning most of the speaking chores over to others.

For several days, Clinton has been suffering from hoarseness, a chronic problem doctors say is caused by excessive talking and aggravated by allergies.

At his rally in Richmond, Clinton and his wife, Hillary, shared the podium with one of his former rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder. Hillary Clinton told her husband’s supporters they must guard against the chance that some among them “will lose our nerve” and return to the Republican fold.

“It is not by any means over,” she said.

In Baton Rouge, Clinton again gave his sore throat a rest and spoke for only three minutes at a rally forced into a small gymnasium on the campus of Southern University when rain turned an outdoor site soggy.

The small crowd, which did not quite fill the floor of the basketball court, responded enthusiastically to the Democratic ticket, waving white handkerchiefs overhead and drowning out a small but persistent clutch of hecklers.

Gore, in his comments, employed a version of the sports cliche Clinton had used earlier in the day, telling his listeners: “It’s not over ‘til the fat lady sings.”

He added: “She hasn’t sung yet, but I hear her warming up.”

Clinton aides, in releasing the candidate’s schedule a week in advance, conceded that the move had an element of political psychological warfare in it.

Referring to the Western portion of the schedule, Clinton adviser Bruce Lindsay said: “These are all states where we feel we have a reasonable chance of winning. But if it spooks the Bush-Quayle people a bit, so much the better.”

Early announcement of a candidate’s travel plans also can make it easier to build impressive crowds in the days before the Nov. 3 election.

After the final presidential debate Monday night in East Lansing, Mich., Clinton plans to campaign in Chicago and Milwaukee--traditionally friendly to Democrats, and then set out on a two-day, seven-state “fly-around” of the West, accompanied by several of the region’s Democratic governors.

The schedule would take him to four states that have been dependably Republican in recent presidential elections--Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Nevada, which offer all of 18 electoral votes out of the 270 needed for victory--as well as Washington and, perhaps, Oregon. It would end with an afternoon rally in Los Angeles next Thursday.

From there, Clinton plans to return to Bush’s adopted home state of Texas as well as Louisiana and, perhaps, New Mexico, before returning to Arkansas for a day of rest. After that, aides say he will probably spend the last 10 days of the campaign traveling through battleground states of the Midwest and South.