Clinton Points to Key Policy Gains : White House: A confident President says actions abroad, economic upturn show ‘America’s on the move.’ Press conference is designed to put troubles behind him.

President Clinton, striving to show that he has his agenda and Administration under control, asserted Thursday night that key recent signs of economic improvement, from low interest rates to gradual job growth, directly reflect the impact of his deficit-reduction plan.

Appearing at his first prime-time White House press conference, Clinton used colorful charts and confident language in an effort to package a number of small achievements abroad and in Congress as major accomplishments and to convey the idea that his recent skein of troubles are now behind him.

“Here at home, America’s on the move. The last few days have been impressive,” Clinton said, citing impending Senate committee action on his economic plan. “This means we are putting our economic house in order.”

Clinton studiously avoided getting involved in the details of the ongoing Senate negotiations over his budget package. He claimed that his broad principles were being preserved, even as the Senate Finance Committee was moving to approve a bill vastly different from the President’s original proposal.

On foreign policy, Clinton declared that the U.S.-led military crackdown in Somalia is a success, but acknowledged that American troops would stay in the troubled African nation indefinitely to guard against new violence.

On other issues, Clinton said:

* That the international community will have to send some sort of multinational military force to Haiti or there will never be civil peace in that beleaguered country. He said that remains his view, even though both ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the nation’s sitting military government have rejected it.

* That the U.S. government would “have to consider very seriously” a plan to partition Bosnia into separate ethnic enclaves if the warring Serb, Croat and Muslim factions agreed to it.

* That he still holds out hope of presenting a welfare reform plan this year that would put a limit on the length of time recipients could receive benefits.

The President’s performance was a studied exercise in public and press relations, as he bantered jocularly with reporters while appealing over their heads to a nationwide television audience. The press conference was his first during prime-time hours and was the centerpiece of an intensified new campaign to show that he has turned the corner after his Administration got off to a rocky start.

But the potential impact of Clinton’s performance was undercut by the decision of two of the three big national networks not to televise the press conference live. With Clinton having conducted an afternoon press conference only two days earlier, ABC and CBS chose not to interrupt commercial programming for this one.

A series of gaffes and controversies, including the withdrawal of a top Justice Department nominee, have seen Clinton’s public approval ratings sink to low levels recently and have created the impression of growing White House disarray. The President angrily ended a session with the press Monday after the first question, which concerned the fitful selection process for a new Supreme Court justice.

Thursday Clinton admitted that he came to Washington naive about the ways of Congress and the national press corps, and said that he has learned a tough lesson.

“I knew when I came here that there would be things that I would need to learn about the processes and the way things work. I believed then, and I believe now, that if I do the big things right and deal with the big issues that eventually the other things will also work themselves out.”

Appearing relaxed and self-assured, Clinton took questions for more than 30 minutes after an opening statement on Somalia and the domestic economy.

He declared that the United States “must and will continue to exert global leadership,” a direct answer to critics who claim that his foreign policy is marked by an austere and miserly view of America’s role in the post-Cold War world.

On domestic affairs, Clinton utilized a series of color-coded charts in seeking to demonstrate that his economic plan, if enacted, would reduce the deficit by $500 billion over the next five years, while cutting spending and shifting the tax burden more toward the wealthiest Americans.

For every $10 in deficit reduction, he said, $5 would come from spending reductions, $3.75 from tax increases on the rich and $1.25 from new taxes on people whose incomes are between $30,000 and $100,000 a year.

“This is a very progressive and fair plan,” he insisted.

Pointing to an upward-sweeping red line on a graph demonstrating that the deficit would have expanded significantly over the next five years if the policies of the George Bush Administration were left in place, reaching an annual shortfall of $400 billion by 1998, Clinton said: “I just got here, and I may have a lot to learn, but I didn’t create the red line.”

This year’s deficit is projected to be $322 billion, but Clinton projects that it will decline to about $200 billion a year by 1998 if his policies are enacted.

The President sought during his press conference to avoid a detailed discussion of the ongoing debate over his budget in the Senate Finance Committee.

He stressed that he would be open to any congressional budget agreement as long as it achieves his basic objectives: a total of $500 billion in deficit reduction over five years, with 50% of the savings coming from spending cuts; a bill that hits the rich with 75% of any tax increases and creation of a deficit reduction trust fund that provides the public with a guarantee that any tax increases are going to pay down the federal debt.

“We have to reduce the deficit by reducing the unfairness of the 1980s,” Clinton said.

Yet the President was counting as spending cuts his proposal to raise taxes on Social Security benefits. He also included a forecast for savings from reduced federal interest payments on the national debt that he expects to come as the deficit is reduced.

Clinton also insisted that he will be able to achieve the bulk of his new domestic spending initiatives, even though Congress already has made deep cutbacks in major parts of his program.

Clinton skirted questions about how he hopes to reconcile the stark differences over tax and spending policies that separate the budget bill passed by the House and the one that now seems likely to emerge from the Senate.

And when reminded that during last year’s presidential campaign he had strongly opposed the very kind of gasoline tax now being considered by the Senate Finance Committee, he explained that updated budget-deficit projections had gotten so much worse that unpalatable options could not be avoided.

While hailing his economic program’s achievements, Clinton refused to give ground on problems faced by his other chief priority, health care reform. He insisted that the program could still be approved this year, after the economic plan is passed, even though most other political leaders have said they consider that all but impossible.

Clinton said he is optimistic that the health program will get a quick boost from public support because millions of families are “terrified” by the prospect of losing their health insurance coverage.

The President said that he is “getting quite close to making the final choices from among the options” presented by the task force headed by his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

That could happen in late July. “Then we’ll go forward with it,” Clinton said.

“There’s a real shot we can act on it this year,” he added. Failing that, the President indicated he would push for enactment in 1994.

Turning to foreign policy, Clinton said that the U.S. government would be willing to consider even a very unsatisfactory solution to the crisis in Bosnia if the three ethnic groups decide they could live with it. He said that the United States even would seriously consider a result that would partition the country in a way that leaves the Serbs in control of territory they have conquered and “ethnically cleansed.”

Earlier, the United States had objected to proposals that seemed to reward Serb aggression. But in recent days, the Muslim-led Bosnian government has indicated that it may be forced to accept a peace plan that ratifies Serb gains.

“My preference is for a multiethnic state,” Clinton said. “But if the parties themselves, including the Bosnian government, agree--genuinely and honestly agree--on another solution, the United States would have to consider it very seriously.”

When a questioner suggested that the Bosnia outcome might encourage aggression elsewhere, Clinton said: “This plan shows that a civil war that has roots going back centuries . . . has not been resolved in the way that I certainly would have hoped.”

Clinton rejected a suggestion that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had outlived its usefulness because of its inability to cope with the ethnic conflict over the ruins of Yugoslavia.

“I don’t think its time to dismantle NATO,” he said, recalling that leaders of formerly communist states in eastern Europe all have expressed a desire to join the 16-nation alliance.

Although he seemed unaware that the U.N. Security Council had approved U.S.-backed economic sanctions against Haiti Wednesday, including an embargo on oil shipments, he predicted that the military regime now controlling that country eventually will give way to international pressure calling for the restoration of democracy and the return of elected President Aristide. But he said that an international peacekeeping force probably will have to be deployed to the impoverished island to seal any settlement.

“There will never be a resolution of that (Haitian conflict) . . . unless we have a multinational peacekeeping force,” Clinton said.

Times staff writers Karen Tumulty, James Risen, Norman Kempster, Edwin Chen and Robert A. Rosenblatt in Washington and Steven Herbert in Los Angeles contributed to this story.