NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Uses 2-Track Plan to Project Public Image : Politics: President-elect casts himself as a man of the people while appealing to Washington’s Establishment.

If his long campaign for the White House proved anything, it is that Bill Clinton believes in nothing more deeply than his own ability to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable.

Now he’s at it again.

Since his election as President last month, Clinton has moved aggressively to project a public image along two tracks that appear to be running in entirely opposite directions.

On one track, he is using a variety of symbols--from his stop at a McDonald’s in Washington, D.C., to his plans to ride a bus to his inauguration--to convince ordinary people that he is one of them, not part of the capital’s professional political class.

On the other track, he is taking concrete steps--from topping his transition team with Establishment figures to appearing for inspection next Monday night at a dinner hosted by Washington Post matriarch Katharine Graham--to assure the professional politicians and the Washington Establishment that he can work with them.

“He’s a master of narrow-casting,” says one veteran liberal lobbyist in Washington. “He’s signaling to the Establishment: ‘I’m OK, because I’ve got people you know making the picks.’ And he’s signaling to the mass audience: ‘I’m OK, because I’m going to McDonald’s and I’m taking the bus.’ ”

At a personal level, the dual approach reflects competing aspects of Clinton’s political persona: the populist outsider arriving from Arkansas to bring change to Washington and the insider educated at Georgetown, Oxford and Yale who is determined to prove that he can play the traditional power game with the old pros.

At another level, while skeptics might argue that the two-track strategy is little more than the time-honored impulse of politicians to be all things to all people, Clinton aides portray it as a tactical response to a basic ambiguity in how the public views Washington and its problems. On the one hand, many Americans profoundly believe that the country has been on the wrong track and blame Washington’s Establishment for that. On the other hand, many Americans--often the same people--fear the prospect of too much change.

The result, said Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos, is that “making people comfortable with change”--a slogan with embedded ambiguity--has become an overriding concern underlying much of what Clinton does.

That concern already may be shaping Clinton’s decisions about whom to select for his Cabinet. Even top aides concede that they know little about Clinton’s plans, but many believe that he hopes to balance the Cabinet among old and new, Washington insiders and outsiders, former Jimmy Carter Administration officials and non-Washington figures.

Clinton’s efforts to run simultaneously along these insider and outsider tracks raise many questions. One is whether he can, in fact, balance both of these aims--whether he can simultaneously mollify institutional Washington and force it to change in ways that put substance behind his symbols of reform.

There is also the question of whether Clinton and those around him may overestimate the extent to which manipulating images will enable them to overcome obstacles and bring about meaningful change--which, for most Americans, is likely to be the litmus test of his presidency.

Already, elements of the Democratic Party’s populist left complain of hypocrisy in the contrast between Clinton’s outsider public image and his reliance on veteran powerbrokers such as corporate attorneys Vernon E. Jordan Jr. and Warren Christopher to head his transition team.

“It’s two worlds that seem to be emerging,” said consumer advocate Ralph Nader. “The first world seems to be accommodating the powerbrokers as the reality of his Administration and the veneer is this folksy down-home people-toucher.”

Others believe Clinton’s dexterity at managing these dual messages bodes well for his ability to work with Congress--or appeal to the people if he needs to do so. “It looks like they are going to embark on a two-pronged campaign to work with Congress and the insiders . . . while he knows they will always know he has the ability to go over their heads to the people,” says Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s media adviser.

In his efforts during the campaign to establish himself as a non-traditional politician, Clinton put great emphasis on making himself directly available to voters in non-traditional settings--town meetings, morning talk shows, MTV, the Arsenio Hall show. To a large extent, the medium became the message.

That pattern already appears locked in place for the new Administration. Hoping in part to emphasize the contrast with President Bush--who was widely criticized for seeming oblivious to life beyond the White House bubble--Clinton has jumped at every opportunity to portray himself as being in touch with ordinary concerns.

His aides have planned a populist inaugural week that will include a bus trip by Clinton, lower ticket prices for major events of the celebration and an open house at the White House--although the $20-million price tag, and the private donations paying for it, impart more than a whiff of Washington’s old ways of doing things.

Aides are also drawing plans for White House versions of the televised town meetings that Clinton employed during the campaign. Advisers say that the incoming President also is likely to make himself available for questioning on television programs.

Carter, the last Democratic chief executive, came into office bearing many of these same hopes of demystifying the presidency and maintaining contact with voters. In a celebrated memo written during Carter’s transition to power, his pollster, Patrick H. Caddell, counseled the President-elect to conduct a “continuing political campaign” with town meetings, televised question-and-answer sessions, fireside chats and symbolic populist gestures, such as cutting his White House staff. Clinton is mulling variations on all those ideas today.

Where the new President-elect departs from Carter’s path is his emphasis on co-opting Washington. Carter and his top lieutenants seemed intent on deliberately snubbing the capital Establishment; Clinton, as is his style, is smothering them with consultation.

After a campaign where Clinton constantly struggled against voter perceptions that he was, at heart, a typical politician, some around the President-elect fear that this reassurance can go too far. One senior aide said he worries that in both of his press conferences with congressional leaders last month, Clinton struck not a single challenging note. Indeed, he backed away from his insistence on congressional staff cuts, an idea spectacularly unpopular on Capitol Hill.

There are also some faint rumblings in the Clinton camp about the overwhelmingly Establishment cast of the apparent leading contenders for the central economic policy jobs--with names such as Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.), a consummate Washington insider, and investment banker Robert E. Rubin, who answers to the same description on Wall Street, topping the speculation for Treasury secretary.

And some fret that partying with network anchors and Georgetown socialites at Pamela Harriman’s home, as Clinton did last month, sends precisely the wrong signal.

In the end, Americans may pay far less attention to whether Clinton’s insider or outsider image predominates than whether the combination of approaches--or some other strategy--produces significant results.

Clinton will face a series of early tests to his commitment to reform. Although he has talked of strong ethics rules to limit lobbying by his appointees after they leave government, aides are saying that writing those rules in ways that do not prevent Clinton from recruiting the people he needs has proved complicated.

Campaign finance reform legislation, which he promised during the campaign, will be equally difficult: “You’re really hitting people where they live,” one aide said.

And even those fights pale beside the looming struggles to break the gridlock over economic policy and deficit reduction, as well as systematic reform of the health care system.

Symbolic gestures that demonstrate empathy may “buy Clinton a whole lot of time” from the public as he fights to implement his program, Rafshoon says.

But, like Carter, Clinton may find symbols of empathy thin defense if his program does not produce results. “If things start going bad,” said Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, “there’s no way symbols are going to do very much.”