First Lady’s Suggestion Puts White House Back on Track : Presidency: She spotted lack of a story line. President and aides resume campaign war tactics; change pays off.

It was on the Saturday before the Super Bowl, in the midst of the rockiest early days of the Clinton Administration, that the President and his top aides began to realize what they were missing.

Like a half-completed novel, they had characters galore, plenty of drama and a surfeit of subplots. What they lacked, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton told her husband and members of his Cabinet gathered that day at Camp David, was “a story.”

Now, with the Administration having completed what White House Communications Director George Stephanopoulos labeled “our first normal week,” the importance of that insight has become clear.

With their economic plan in place and a clear story line about it in hand, Clinton and his aides have spent the last 10 days doing what they know best--hitting the road, campaigning to sell the plan to the nation. In doing so, they have not exactly recreated their Little Rock campaign war room in the White House, but they have returned to their campaign war tactics.

Whether those tactics will prevail is unclear. Clinton must still figure out how to meld his economic plan with his proposals for health care reform without overloading the political system. And his plans face a series of tough votes over the next four to five months as opponents seek to pick them apart. Prospects remain particularly dicey in the Senate, where Clinton must try to satisfy both calls for more spending cuts and moves to protect favored programs.

That point was driven home to Clinton’s team the day of his speech to Congress when Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen visited his former colleagues at a Senate Democratic caucus lunch.

“Half the questions were ‘Why aren’t you cutting more?’ ” recalled one Administration figure who accompanied Bentsen. “The other was ‘Aren’t you cutting too much?’

“I honestly don’t know which side is more serious and which has more clout,” the adviser said.

For now, however, with numerous polls showing the public favoring his plan, and with the opposition Republicans appearing almost paralyzed by internal divisions, Clinton’s tactics appear to be winning.

The planning process that led to the approach began a month ago, at a weekend Cabinet retreat at Camp David.

Clinton had gathered the Cabinet together to enable the members of his team to get to know each other better. He also invited three of his top political advisers--pollster Stanley Greenberg, media adviser Mandy Grunwald and political strategist Paul Begala--to brief the group on the essence of his year-long campaign for the presidency. But as the political advisers and Administration officials talked, Clinton and his aides began to realize they were missing something.

It was then that Mrs. Clinton reminded the group of the importance in politics of having a clear story to tell.

When the Clintons campaigned across Arkansas in 1983 to win support for large-scale education reform, she told the Cabinet members, they had such a story: Because Arkansas had poor schools, its work force was badly educated. Because of that, the state attracted low-wage industries. To raise wages, Arkansans would have to improve their schools. To do that, they would have to spend more. And to spend more, they would have to raise taxes.

Now, she said, the Clinton Administration was preparing to sell a large-scale economic plan to a national public. Once again, they would need a clear story and, at that point, they did not have one.

“There were all these ideas around,” said one participant in the session. “But no one had a plan.” That evening, on the 90-minute drive back to Washington, Begala and Grunwald began to put together the themes for a plan.

Over the next five days, two White House aides--communications deputies Ricki Seidman and David Dreyer--began to turn those themes into a precise campaign schedule. On the first Friday in February, as other White House aides scrambled to contain the damage from the collapse of the proposed Kimba Wood nomination for attorney general, Seidman and Dreyer presented their plan to a meeting of Clinton’s top political, communications and scheduling aides.

To a remarkable degree, Clinton was able to stick to that plan for the rest of the month--from holding a televised town meeting in Detroit, to unveiling cuts in the White House staff the week before his speech to Congress, to using St. Louis--the end point for his first campaign bus trip--as the launching point for the sales campaign that followed the unveiling of his economic plan.

The campaign strategy also included a central theme that has proved highly successful in keeping Clinton’s opposition off balance--the hard-line insistence that critics of Clinton’s ideas come up with their own detailed alternatives. Clinton emphasized that point in his first speech after unveiling his economic plan and has continued to do so ever since, forcing Republicans into an uncomfortable defensive posture.

To continue their planning process, Clinton’s communications, political and legislative strategists--joined routinely by Greenberg, Begala, Grunwald, Democratic Party Chairman David Wilhelm and sometimes by strategist James Carville--meet each day at 5 p.m. in a large conference room in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House to plot strategy. The meetings, chaired by White House Political Director Rahm Emmanuel, serve much the same purpose as the late-afternoon war room meetings that were a fixture of life in Little Rock during the fall campaign.

But while the procedures and tactics the White House now uses closely resemble those of the campaign, two key factors make the campaign for the economic plan different from the presidential race.

The first major difference, notes Greenberg, is the audience. In the presidential campaign, Clinton aimed his message directly at voters. Now, his goal is to mobilize voters to influence Congress. During the campaign, Clinton aides used sophisticated polling to target their resources at key electoral voters. Over the next few weeks, they hope to use Capitol Hill nose counts to focus presidential attention on corralling the votes of key, wavering members of Congress.

Behind closed doors, Clinton began that process this past week, holding Oval Office meetings, for example, with Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), the head of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, to discuss military spending cuts.

Also, amid the flurry of contacts with key members of Congress, Clinton placed repeated telephone calls to Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.), a conservative member of the Senate Finance Committee who had expressed reservations about the plan immediately after it was unveiled. By week’s end, those calls had paid off and Boren had given the plan an unequivocal endorsement.

The President also appears to be ready to play some hardball with lawmakers who resist the plan. Sources say that over the next few days, Clinton is likely to punish Alabama Sen. Richard C. Shelby, the only Democrat in the Senate who has made clear his intention to vote against the President’s package. For years, the Office of Management and Budget has wanted to save money by consolidating work on the space station in one place. It is now split between facilities in Alabama and Texas. In the past, the White House has blocked such a move. Now, aides say, the move will be approved, switching millions of dollars in NASA contracts to Texas.

Over the next couple of weeks, Clinton plans to travel to the home districts of those whose votes he needs to win.

The other major difference from the presidential campaign, Clinton aides have discovered, is the ability of the President--any President--to command attention.

The presidential campaign “was all about fighting for air time and fighting to get a forum,” said Grunwald. By contrast, “the White House really is a bully pulpit. You have a waiting press corps and you have the attention of the American people.”

Or, as Carville said recently to White House aides--in a tone of some awe--”When the President says something, people hear it.”

During the first couple of weeks of the new Administration, White House aides seemed uncertain about how to use the presidency to dominate public debate and allowed others--particularly opponents of Clinton’s plans to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military--to set the agenda. That has begun to change.

Over the next month, the change will become even more marked as Clinton invites a host of foreign leaders to meet with him, aiming for the sort of favorable publicity a President almost always receives from sessions with other heads of state. Between now and the start of the congressional recess in the second week of April, Clinton plans to hold a summit meeting with Russian President Boris Yeltsin and meet with the chief executives of Israel, Egypt, France, Germany, Ireland and Haiti and the secretary general of NATO.

Aides expect those meetings to strengthen Clinton’s hand with Congress. “The American people like to see their President operating on the world stage,” Stephanopoulos said.

Clinton also has employed more traditional campaign tactics. In the past 10 days, he has visited five states that were key to his election victory--Missouri, Ohio, New York, California and Washington. Monday, he travels to a sixth such electoral battleground, New Jersey.

He has sat for more than 30 interviews with local television stations in markets from Maine to San Diego where his political advisers believed his plan needed extra sales help. An interview with local broadcasters in Des Moines, for example, gave Clinton a forum to answer questions about how his proposed new energy tax and budget cuts would affect rural interests. An interview with San Diego stations allowed Clinton to reassure commuters that the impact of higher energy costs on them would be limited.

“It gives us a chance to focus on questions of particular regional concern,” said Jeff Eller, the White House director of media affairs, whose job it is to handle Clinton’s effort to reach over the heads of the Washington press corps and deal directly with local media.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s political apparatus at the Democratic National Committee has begun an outpouring of direct mail, telephone banks and constituency organizing.

The results of that sort of activity could be seen last Thursday, when Clinton gathered high-profile business and labor leaders at the White House to declare their support for his plan. As he did so, top Administration officials held similar public sessions in Philadelphia, Houston and Tampa.

“We’re continuing to wage the campaign we started with the speech, building support for the program,” said political director Emmanuel. “It’s all part of getting Clintonomics through.”