NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Was Given Chance to Show He Is a Fit Steward : Audience: The sessions were also a seminar to put into sharper focus for Americans many of the details of the new team’s fiscal programs.

As an exercise in political stagecraft, Bill Clinton’s economic conference seemed to have one key objective: to get the nation thinking about economic policy in the President-elect’s terms.

Above all, the televised summit seemed structured by Clinton’s team to achieve a national consensus that the economic policies of the last 12 years had failed and that there is an urgent need for change in line with the policies Clinton has proposed.

Of course, that was the point at issue--decided in Clinton’s favor--in the presidential election in November.

“We wouldn’t be sitting here today if most American voters didn’t feel in their bones that something was very wrong with the economy,” said Robert Solow, a Nobel prize-winning economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Clinton supporter.

But the conference was, in effect, a detail-rich follow-up seminar. It clearly presented the American people with the intellectual arguments that form the basis of his program. And it gave Clinton the opportunity to persuade the country, and especially the business community, that he has the ideas and the temperament to be the nation’s economic leader.

The strategy could backfire, however, if Americans conclude that they had witnessed a carefully orchestrated conference that was little more than a charade.

If Clinton succeeded on a political level, it was largely because of his own deft performance in running the conference.

Stacking the deck of keynote speakers with his economic advisers and others who support his views also helped to sell his agenda. While some Republicans were included, notably absent were true-believing supply-siders who might have openly argued with Clinton.

At his closing press conference Tuesday night, Clinton seemed pleased that the meeting had been such a political bonanza--and such an effective sales tool. He quickly proclaimed that a broad consensus had been forged around his agenda.

In terms of actual policy development, however, the two day talk-a-thon broke little ground.

The conference failed to resolve critical issues on an array of economic issues, most notably how best to balance the conflicting demands for deficit reduction and for budget-straining short-term stimulus. While that issue dominated the second session Tuesday, Clinton offered few new clues to how it will be answered by his Administration.

“We’ll just have to see,” Clinton said, when asked about the need for a stimulus program. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

The summit also exposed the reality that--while Clinton has a broad economic agenda he wants to sell Congress and the American people--he still finds it difficult to choose between the competing objectives that live side by side within his program.

Can, for example, Clinton resolve the need to curb the budget deficit with his belief that the government has woefully underspent on public works and education? Can he control health care costs while expanding health care access to the poor? Can environmental regulations be toughened without becoming a drag on a slumping economy?

The details of how he will address such dilemmas--beyond the skeleton outlines offered during the heat of the campaign--are only slowly emerging from the Clinton camp.

Indeed, during the conference here Clinton again showed himself to be a fan of public policy who sees merit in almost every idea. But he dropped few clues when the discussion turned to the question of how he might choose between competing claims on his political capital.

“This is a very tough call,” was a typical Clinton response.

That was especially clear Tuesday, which was dominated by working sessions in which summit participants presented Clinton with an eye-glazing series of policy proposals mostly targeted to benefit specific industries.

Still, as a national tutorial on the economy, the summit served a useful purpose: It presented a cogent and comprehensive case for the emerging outlines of Clinton’s economic program. With sophisticated color graphics supplied by Apple Computer and addresses by leading economists, Fortune 500 CEOs and think tank experts, the summit had the look and feel of an event designed to make sure that everyone was reading from the same page on the economy.

The central premise was the same as that of Clinton’s campaign literature: The country has not one, but two deficits--a budget deficit and an investment deficit. And, while government spending soared over the last 12 years, the Ronald Reagan and Bush Administrations ignored long-term investments in America’s people, its public works and its companies that would make the nation more competitive.

So while curbing the budget deficit is important to Clinton’s agenda, he does not want to let it obscure the need he sees for such costly and wide-ranging initiatives as job training, child nutrition and tax incentives for business investment. Complicating the discussion over Clinton’s long-term strategy is the more urgent debate over whether Clinton should try to foster a quick recovery.

By explaining in detail many of those elements and taking telephone calls from radio listeners around the country, the conference offered some compelling moments for a country that showed again and again throughout this election year that it is hungry for answers and is eager to listen to political leaders talk about issues.

Robert B. Reich, Clinton’s appointee to be secretary of labor, offered an appraisal near the end of the meeting that seemed to sum up the enthusiastic response of C-SPAN viewers around the country who called in praising the conference’s focus on policy detail.

“I’ve attended many academic conferences where afterward most people remember what they said rather than what they heard, but this was quite different.”