NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton May Emerge From Fight With His Allies Intact : Interest groups: Labor and environmentalists are criticizing the plan, but both hint that it will not hurt long-term relations with the White House.

When he thrust himself into the Pacific Northwest timber dispute, President Clinton apparently hoped to craft a split-the-difference compromise that would win support from both sides of the issue.

It was clear Thursday that he had failed to do that. “We know our solutions may not make everybody happy--indeed, they may not make anybody happy,” the President said as he announced his timber-management plan and acknowledged that finding the remedy had been more difficult than he had expected.

But he and his aides may do better in his secondary goal of convincing the world that a President who has not always been praised for his resoluteness ought to get points for taking a stand on an intractable issue.

Although the decision is likely to cost him support in logging areas, aides said they hope that elsewhere in the country he will be seen as a peacemaker.

“For courage, you’ve got to give him an A-plus,” one official said.

And Clinton comes away from a fight that has pitted the important Democratic constituencies of organized labor and environmentalists against each other, apparently without serious damage to his relations with those groups.

Although they have expressed concern about what they see as the plan’s shortcomings, environmentalists said they do not consider Clinton’s stance on the issue as a black mark on his environmental record.

And some acknowledged that the seven-year struggle had become a zero-sum game, in which one side’s gain would necessarily be the other’s loss.

“You can criticize it, yes, but this was an honest attempt to take on a damnably difficult problem,” said Ben McNitt of the National Wildlife Federation.

Clinton’s relations with the environmentalists have not been without strain. He angered them by backing off on a proposal to raise mining and grazing fees on federal lands and disappointed many of them by backing away from plans for a tax on the heat content of fuels.

But they also have praised him for his commitment to reduce global warming and protect rare plant and animal species.

Clinton’s announcement has left organized labor with a sense that it has lost more than the environmentalists.

Yet labor officials said they doubt that their anger will open a breach in their relations with Clinton. Some acknowledge that the President had few choices.

Jay Power, a lobbyist for the AFL-CIO, said he considers the plan “disastrous” but added: “One would make a mistake to draw a larger conclusion from this area of disagreement.”

While some members of the Northwest’s congressional delegation were vowing to fight the plan, Clinton’s efforts brought praise from a growing group that believes the region’s top priority should be ending the fight.

“He got handed a horrible mess,” said Rep. Jolene Unsoeld (D-Wash.). “The last two administrations were denying there was a problem, and the Congress was absolutely stymied.”

Administration aides said they had done all they could to put together a plan that was legally beyond reproach and evenhanded.

The first stage was to turn to a scientific panel to establish the maximum amount of timber cutting that would also permit survival of the endangered spotted owl. When the panel offered a choice of eight options, Administration officials concluded that none would have allowed enough cutting and called for more choices.

They changed the rules to allow logging closer to streams and to permit more logging through thinning of trees and salvaging of fallen timber. These changes added about 400 million board feet to the permissible annual cut, bringing it to 1.2 billion board feet a year.

While labor and industry complained that this level of harvest would cost as many as 85,000 jobs, environmentalists said it nonetheless would threaten the long-term survival of some animal species. This option became the Administration’s final choice.