Trying to Be Two Different Things, Clinton Winds Up Pleasing No One : Politics: The President sold himself to voters as a ‘New Democrat’ but his social policies offer the old liberal agenda. Just what sort of politician is he?

In a “Saturday Night Live” takeoff on TV advertising, the announcer held up his product and told the viewing audience triumphantly, “It’s a floor polish and a dessert topping!” President Bill Clinton should remember this line in the coming months. He sold himself to the country as a smooth political blend of views and characteristics that barely belong in the same universe. Now the people who wanted a floor polish are angry that they can’t see their face in the linoleum, while the folks in search of a dessert topping feel a little queasy in the stomach.

Clinton the centrist Democrat is struggling to deliver on the campaign promises he made to ordinary Americans. But a different Clinton seems to be handling the social and cultural controversies before the Administration--and doing so in a way that has sapped the reservoir of good will a President needs to tide him over when policy triumph eludes him.

Many people in this country are still deeply exercised about the controversies--over issues ranging from pornography and crime to attitudes toward the military--that first ripped this country apart in the mid-1960s. With Clinton’s 1992 campaign, it looked as though some of these old conflicts might be put to rest.

Candidate Clinton’s “New Democrat” label was code for something like, “I am not one of those effete liberal elitists you think of when you hear ‘Democrat.’ I am one of you.” Clinton’s proposed middle-class tax cut was not just a financial pledge but a cultural symbol of his concern for the values of most Americans.

On specific social issues, like abortion or gay rights, Clinton’s liberal positions won him the valuable support of activists on the left. But to his larger audience, his down-home Southern style and his rhetoric of family and responsibility sent the message that the culture war was over and the traditionalists had won.

So Clinton seemed familiar and safe. Voters felt free to focus on “the economy, stupid” and unseat George Bush.

Today, Clinton-the-centrist is having a hard time selling his economic plans to fairly conservative middle-class Americans. But the activist part of the Clinton coalition is doing swimmingly. The family-leave bill passed. Abortion services are due for inclusion in the new national health plan. The President has supported gays serving openly in the military. The Administration is shoehorning large numbers of women and minorities into jobs. Race-norming is to be found in education legislation. The Justice Department is getting an infusion of progressive officials.

It’s not just official acts. The White House is full of youth who sometimes display a negative view of the U.S. military. Hollywood, mostly exiled from power during the Reagan-Bush years, is all over Washington--there are regular sightings by us locals. Our President recently got a $200 haircut on Air Force One from a famed Beverly Hills coiffeur.

On some social issues, the Administration probably has the support or acquiescence of most Americans, but might cause widespread disquiet if it goes any farther. In some areas, there is already trouble, as with gays in the military.

On still other topics, such as affirmative action and quotas, Clinton’s opponents have cheerfully announced they are preparing aggravation for him in the near future. Some pieces of news, like the tales of Hollywood-on-the-Potomac and the callow, anti-military kids in the White House, just sit there unpleasantly in the background, waiting for some smart political entrepreneur to light a match.

Add it all up and you get a picture very like that of the effete liberal elitist McGovernites that candidate Clinton spent so much effort trying to erase.

The President acts as if he can continue to smother this picture in a sauce of economic populism. Thus he inveighs against the drug companies and follows the counsel of advisers who tell him to get out on the campaign trail again.

But if the economy does not get up off its bed and dance, this populist talk will not suffice. Worse for Clinton, all those other issues bequeathed by the wonderful 1960s will loom large again. And the President, if he keeps to his current course, will find himself on the wrong side too many times. Voters will not grant him the same tolerance they would give a politician whose outlook they more fully identify with.

The Administration will find itself permanently crippled if the President does not address this weakness--either by producing a big win on the health-and-economics issues that trouble middle-class Americans or by adjusting his stance toward some of the social and cultural issues now before him.

One way of laying up some insurance against hard political times is to throw some weight to the other side in the cultural fights. The Clintonite who seems to understand this best is--no surprise--Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has begun to speak out about the “politics of meaning”--how we must seek our spiritual side and be of service to others. And there she was, standing up for free speech in her commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania, not exactly a hotbed of unbridled expression in recent months.

These warm and fuzzy statements were not much, but they were something. Certainly, not many of the enthusiasts around the President, animated by 12 years’ worth of pent-up ideological energy, show a lot of willingness to protect him in a similar way.

For this reason, it is too bad that Mrs. C is occupied with health-care reform instead of acting as a full-time free safety.

On the other hand, the First Lady’s coming health-care plan is Clinton’s remaining near-term chance for a big domestic-policy coup. If he comes up with a plan that alleviates Americans’ anxiety about health insurance, and does so without an outrageous price tag, he will have spoken loudly to the concrete concerns of middle-class Americans and redeemed a big chunk of the promises implied in his campaign rhetoric.

Only if this happens will Clinton have the political room to follow the agendas of his social-issues activists, as he is doing now, without damaging himself beyond repair. If the President will not change his current social-issues strategy, he had better hope that Hillary has her medical kit packed and ready to bind up the battlefield wounds and administer the necessary transfusions.