NEWS ANALYSIS : President’s Tone Signals Bitter Battle Expected

WASHINGTON — Reaching back into the strongest traditions of his party, President Clinton chose a sharply adversarial tone for his first nationally broadcast speech to the nation Monday--one which provides a foretaste of what White House aides expect will be a bitterly fought battle over his economic program in the months to come.

Evoking images of some of the titanic political struggles of the past, Clinton sought to align himself with the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman as a hard-working leader dedicated to fairness for all Americans and determined to rally the people against the forces of greed and privilege.

He denounced those who will oppose the economic blueprint he is scheduled to unveil in a speech to a joint session of Congress Wednesday as “defenders of decline” and wrapped his own formula for revitalizing the economy in nothing less than the American flag:

“When I was a boy,” Clinton said, “we had a name for the belief that we should all pull together to build a better, stronger nation. We called it patriotism. And we still do.”

Behind such strong language was a conviction on the part of the President and his strategists that he could win public support for higher taxes and other sacrifices only by going onto the attack and casting the coming battle in terms of populist morality.

That sort of appeal “is what presidential rhetoric is all about,” said Georgetown University political science professor Michael Robinson. A single speech, alone, is not likely to have much impact on how Congress views Clinton’s plan, Robinson noted, but the sort of language Clinton used is among the most powerful types of appeals a President can make.

At the same time, warned Republican strategist Ken Khachigian, “that sort of rhetoric is a two-edged sword. If the public believes him and gets caught up in it, they can rally to him. On the other hand, the cynics will see it as an affirmation of the old quote that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

Moreover, as one longtime Clinton adviser said recently, “The danger is if you talk about sacrifice too much, people begin to associate it with you.” The aide recalled how Jimmy Carter lost political ground when many voters came to view his energy plan as nothing more than a program for winters without enough heat and summers without air conditioning.

Nothing reflected this President’s strategy better than the way he dealt with the issue of taxes.

Clinton flatly, and for the first time, admitted that he has abandoned one tenet of his campaign--shielding the middle class from tax increases. But he tried to frame that admission in terms that his strategists hope will reduce the political sting and, at the same time, shift blame to his predecessors.

“I had hoped,” Clinton said, addressing America’s vast middle class, to prepare an economic plan “without asking more of you.”

“I’ve worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life to meet that goal. But I can’t,” he said, arguing, in a line he likely will repeat often in the days to come, that “the deficit has increased so much, beyond my earlier estimates and beyond even the worst official government estimates from last year.”

Clinton’s reference to hard work is a key part of the imagery he and his aides have tried to build in recent weeks. “What’s the image people have of the President,” one aide asked recently. “It’s a man sitting at his desk working hard at their problems.” Americans may not always agree with Clinton’s policies, the aide argued, but they will respond to the sense that he is taking their problems seriously--something that polls consistently showed Americans did not believe George Bush had done.

White House strategists also hoped to build on the belief most voters already have that Democrats can more easily be trusted to be “fair” and take care of the interests of average Americans. Clinton made repeated references to fairness in his speech, assuring middle class families that “you’re not going alone anymore.”

Having tried to plant those two images--hard work and fairness--Clinton moved on to concentrate on the second major message of his speech--what he termed a “call to arms.”

Using populist rhetoric of the type once employed by FDR and Truman--and more recently used by Ross Perot--Clinton summoned up images of a legion of “high priced lobbyists” who have “lined the corridors of power.”

“At stake is the control of our economic destiny,” Clinton declared.

Twelve years ago, Ronald Reagan--for whom GOP strategist Khachigian then worked--gave a speech from the Oval Office under very similar circumstances, laying the groundwork for the plan he would unveil a few weeks later.

Clinton’s aides carefully studied Reagan’s speech in preparing for Monday night’s address and make no apologies for borrowing from the opposition’s playbook. “I think what you’re going to see in this package is a reversal of Reaganomics, a reversal of the last 12 years,” White House communications director George Stephanopoulos said. “We think he was following the wrong goals, the wrong priorities, and that his plan hurt the country, but he sold it successfully.”

Both Clinton and Reagan sounded a note of urgency and talked of the federal budget being “out of control.”

But Reagan, Khachigian said, instructed his speech writers to make his first address primarily educational. Clinton, by contrast, cast his speech deliberately in the mode of a campaign battle cry, reflecting the belief of his aides that they face a much tougher battle in selling tax increases than Reagan did in pushing a plan for tax cuts.