Focus Group Gives Clinton’s TV Pitch a Mixed Review : Reaction: ‘Swing’ voters rate him high on health care and foreign policy. But he appears to lack support on the key issue of the economy.

If you believe a tough crowd of suburban Michigan voters, President Clinton did a better job pitching health care and foreign policy Wednesday night than he did promoting his plans to revive the economy.

And that means Clinton may have a harder time than expected when he goes before Congress and the nation next week to try to win support for his new economic initiatives in his address to a joint session of Congress.

That, at least, was the conclusion of 43 “swing” voters--all white, middle-class Michigan residents--who were assembled in a focus group by a polling organization that had worked for the George Bush Administration. Reporters were allowed to watch participants instantly rate the President during his first electronic town meeting since moving into the White House.

While Clinton took questions beamed in from around the country at the studios of WXYZ-TV, the members of the Michigan group watched in a hotel auditorium a few miles away. They registered their approval or disapproval of Clinton’s remarks by turning the dial on a hand-held device that the pollsters called a “perception analyzer.”

The group included one Latino, and was composed of 17 who voted for Bush, 16 who voted for Clinton, eight who voted for Ross Perot and two who did not vote. Fifteen reported family incomes of more than $50,000 a year.

“What we’re looking at are the swing voters in a state that Clinton carried, whose support he’s going to need to carry out his economic program,” said Steve Lombardo research director of Market Strategies Inc., the firm that conducted the instant analysis. One of the company’s principals, Fred Steeper, did Bush’s polling in the last election.

“Clinton knows that he has to move people like these,” Steeper associate Alex Gage said. “If he can’t move these people, he’s got huge problems.”

Move them he did, but not always in the direction he may have intended. If, for example, the evening had been seen as a way to drum up support for the economic message he will deliver next week, it was not an overwhelming success in the eyes of this group.

Under the system used for this focus group, participants were asked before the town meeting began to rate Clinton on a series of issues. Then, as they watched him on television they rated his answers. The greater the approval, the higher the rating number. After the town meeting, they rated Clinton again on the same issues as before the session began.

The biggest jump between Clinton’s pre- and post-town meeting scores came in the area of health care policy, where the President climbed from a 39 to a 50 rating out of a possible 100. His score on handling questions about economic policy rose only three points, from a 41 to a 44.

“I like his stand on health care, someday we’ll have national health care,” said Donna Wheeler, a 51-year-old illustrator who works for Detroit’s Grace Hospital and lives in suburban Redford.

But she did not rate him as high on economic issues. “In 21 days, he hasn’t had a chance to get his hands on it,” Wheeler said.

Fred Unger, 65, who voted for Bush last November, agreed.

“I think he handled the questions about health care very well. But one of his shortcomings was that he didn’t address where he is getting the money to pay for these programs.”

While Clinton scored high on the health care reform issue--at one point scoring a 77--the suburban voters in this focus group were unimpressed by his choice of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to head up the health care task force.

His ratings dropped into the 30s when he mentioned her name in the context of a health care question.

On other issues, Clinton impressed the group members--scoring a 65 when he took on the tough issue of American involvement in the continuing crisis in the former Yugoslavia.

But his score dropped to 38 when he talked about his desire to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military, then climbed dramatically when he said that he believes in imposing a strict code of sexual conduct.

He scored again, earning a 73, when he pledged to help enact a tough crime bill and put drug dealers behind bars.

In the end, Clinton strongly impressed at least one member of the group.

“My overall view was good,” said Sandy Knight, 37, who does domestic work. “He seemed to tell it like it was. The President has a really tough job. He has some plans. I hope they’ll be effective.”