PERSPECTIVE ON THE PRESIDENCY : Grilled Meat, Broccoli, Stiffed Press : By taking his show on the road, Clinton avoids the hard questioning that dogged him on the campaign trail.

Several hours before President Clinton delivered his economic plan to a joint session of Congress, he lunched with four of the most highly visible men in the country, network news anchors Bernard Shaw, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings (where were MacNeil and Lehrer?). This private shmooze, while perfectly legal and arguably uncompromising for the guests, served the President in two ways. The White House lunch, (barley soup; mixed green salad; grilled chicken, veal and beef; broccoli; chocolate cake; iced tea, and coffee), gave Clinton the chance to pitch the proposal on which he worked “harder than I ever have in my life.” It also beclouded an ominous feature of the nascent Administration:

Clinton is stiffing the press.

After four weeks in office and one of the most complicated and important speeches of our nation’s economic life, the President adheres to a policy of managed care and feeding of national and local reporters and barnstorming forays into the heartland as a substitute for presidential press conferences.

Not since the Persian Gulf War has the access of the sandwich-eating working press been so well controlled. The men and women who survived the career promotion process of their own newspapers, magazines and broadcast companies and ascended to the once-coveted title of White House correspondent are being ignored by the President.

The most verbally skilled occupant of the Oval Office since John F. Kennedy is pursuing a road show strategy of town meetings that enables him to embrace the high democratic ideal of talking “directly to the people” and to well-rehearsed children, while bypassing the follow-up questions of the hard-boiled press corps--now restricted, by an armed guard, to a smaller area of the White House.

At a Clinton appearance at Chillicothe High School in Ohio, not all the applauding citizens threw softballs. One woman wanted to know, “How much spending cuts, dollar-wise, will we see?” The President allowed that, early on, the deficit would be reduced more by taxes than spending, but the reductions would be “about the same” after four years. “The net aggregate reduction in the deficit over four years is about $320 billion, over five years is $475 billion less debt than we would otherwise have,” he added. The response, had it been offered at a press conference, would have provoked a series of follow-up questions not likely in the respectful atmosphere of the Chillicothe gymnasium.

While past presidents have embraced similar strategies to avoid the skeptical professional journalists in Washington, Clinton is the first chief executive to begin his presidency with what appears to be a calculated and perhaps permanent effort to side-step the irreverent media folk who are now kept away, not only from the President, but from his press secretaries as well. A uniformed policeman, with his own desk by the door, now has the new responsibility of blocking reporters’ access to the offices of George Stephanopoulos and Dee Dee Meyers. We are left to speculate whether the White House press quietly longs for a return of the affable and more available Bush press boss, Marlin Fitzwater, who managed to survive with only secretarial office security.

The pictures of the new President and Mrs. Clinton striding resolutely to church one recent Sunday morning with nary a glance at the barricaded reporters who shouted questions (except to offer a eulogy to Arthur Ashe), conveys a President disgusted with the mainstream media, whose pursuit of the character issue during the campaign may have left him with an overwhelming disdain for the boys and girls on the bus who forced him to answer unwanted questions until he was “blue in the face.”

The whole world is watching a well-televised drama in which the leader of the freest nation on earth, who just deftly fired the first shot in what could be an American economic revolution, straight-arms the people who are paid to report this great story. Equally discomforting is the reality that millions of Americans, who subscribe to the T-shirt slogan “Lynch the Media Elite,” don’t care whether the President ever meets the press. And most embarrassing of all is the failure of the media establishment to raise even a tepid editorial grievance about the forced isolation that its White House correspondents now endure.