Clinton Defends His First 100 Days as Start of Basic Change

President Clinton declared Sunday that his Administration has begun to “fundamentally change” government’s direction and insisted that he has lived up to all but one of his campaign promises.

In an sometimes-emotional defense of his first 100 days in office before the Newspaper Assn. of America, Clinton said that only the discovery of a surging budget deficit had kept him from a perfect record on his campaign pledges. “I can’t responsibly offer to cut anybody’s taxes when the deficit is going up instead of down,” he said.

But he said that his vow not to raise taxes for the middle class was “to the best of my knowledge” the only promise he had abandoned. The budget, he asserted, was “completely consistent with my campaign promises.”

The appearance, at a packed hotel ballroom, offered Clinton the chance to put his own spin on his record in a week when many analysts are doing so. As he mounted his defense, he showed his sensitivities to recent criticism of his record, and the failure last week of his $16-billion economic stimulus program.

“People say, what did you do in your first 100 days?” Clinton asked. “I say, ‘What did the other guys do in 100 days?’

“You need to have a realistic expectation of about what kind of time it takes to get things done,” Clinton told a questioner in the crowd, a journalism student who brought up Clinton’s slumping approval ratings. “The term is four years, it’s not three months.”

One difficulty of the office is the press coverage that is different from what he got during last year’s campaign, he said.

The defeat of the stimulus package “got 50 times the press coverage of the passage of the multi-trillion-dollar budget resolution,” Clinton said. “Why? Because we won.

“I’m not being critical of you,” he told the publishers. “That’s just the way this whole deal works.”

Clinton staunchly defended his fallen stimulus package, almost as if it were still awaiting congressional approval.

“This jobs program was a responsible approach,” he said, pointing to the slow jobs growth during the past 24 months of economic recovery. “All I wanted to do was to deal with what I think is the No. 1 problem.”

Clinton pointedly noted that in the past, both Republican and Democratic legislators have supported the community development grants that were attacked as wasteful pork barrel projects in his stimulus bill.

“I don’t know what happened that made that such a bad idea, all of a sudden,” Clinton said. On the charge that his spending plans were pork, he said: “I don’t know how you define that.

“I regret the partisan tone of the rhetoric over the past several days,” he said. And he complained of what he viewed as Republicans’ obstructionist intentions.

“We can’t solve the problems of this country if every issue . . . attracts a filibuster in the Senate.”

Clinton promised his Administration would propose further legislation if the economy is again slowing down, as some analysts believe. “If the economy slows down, we’ll go back and try something different,” he said, adding: “I don’t know what it is.”

The President promoted his record. He cited passage of the budget resolution, low mortgage and interest rates and the formulation of initiatives on health care and a variety of other domestic policy areas.

He said his Administration would “bust a gut” working on its priorities.

Clinton also betrayed some impatience with those who have criticized his hesitation to commit United States forces in Bosnia. Asked how the West could stand idly by, Clinton shot back:

“Suppose you tell me what we ought to do?” And, noting the difficulties of any military action in the volatile region, he said that Adolf Hitler had sent thousands of German soldiers to the Balkans during World War II but had been unable to subdue the factional fighting.

The President said that he had spent “immense amounts of time” on the subject.

Clinton also addressed the issue of gay rights, acknowledging the political costs of his support for lifting the ban on gays in the military.

“Some people said I did a terrible thing, and I know I’ve paid a terrible political price,” he said.

“We have to fight for a society that is not at all permissive, but that is tolerant,” Clinton said. “If we’re living together according to certain rules of conduct, we should be able to do so. Just remember that people came to this country because they wanted a good letting alone.”