Boren Assails Budget Negotiations : Legislation: Senator calls for bipartisan ‘summit’ to develop a new plan. Clinton quickly rejects conservatives’ criticism of joint panel.

Two days after Sen. David L. Boren was personally lobbied by President Clinton for support on his economic plan, the Oklahoma Democrat harshly attacked the plan on the Senate floor Tuesday and called for a bipartisan “summit meeting” to develop a new one.

The White House and congressional negotiators, who hope to produce an agreement this week, “have not yet demonstrated a determination to take the inadequate bills passed by both houses and transform them into a product that will face up to our real problems in a way that will merit public confidence and trust,” Boren said.

Boren said that the problem is compounded by the fact that Republicans are being shut out of the talks and “are putting no fingerprints of their own on any budget solution so they can score political points in the next election.”

His criticism reflected a continuing reluctance by many moderate and conservative Democrats in Congress to embrace the package that is being fashioned by the negotiators.

“From what I hear, what they are working on will not be acceptable when it comes out,” said Rep. Charles W. Stenholm (D-Tex.), who led a group of conservatives who met with Clinton Tuesday. “I wish (Boren) well. We’re doing the same thing.”

The White House immediately rejected Boren’s suggestion for scrapping the negotiations and changing course.

“You delay it a couple of months, you are going to have less deficit reduction, higher interest rates, more fragility, uncertainty in the economy, more consumer confidence going down,” Clinton told reporters at the White House.

Leon E. Panetta, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said that the plan must pass quickly to maintain confidence in the economy and warned that Boren’s proposed summit “could become just another excuse for inaction.”

Panetta said in an interview that a dramatic shift in the direction of the negotiations now would be “a disservice” to Democrats who took the political risk of supporting the package in earlier votes.

The Administration was struggling with Republicans as well Tuesday. Negotiations continued over Clinton’s national service program, which Republicans have been filibustering, in part, because they hope to deprive the President of a major victory so close to the crucial vote on his economic program.

As things now stand on his $500-billion deficit-reduction plan, Clinton must hold the support of every Democrat who voted for it when it first came before the Senate and passed by only one vote.

Nor does he have much room for maneuver in the 435-member House, where his plan passed by only six votes.

Over the weekend, Clinton met with three Senate Democrats--Boren, Dianne Feinstein of California and J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana--whose votes the Democrats are fearful of losing. Feinstein wants more federal help for California, which has a severely crippled economy. Johnston’s concerns parallel those of Boren.

Stenholm said Tuesday that he urged the President to abandon his proposed energy tax, which the lawmaker described as the only levy in the package that would hit middle-income Americans, and instead pare the deficit through more cuts in spending, including in entitlement programs.

Nor was Boren the only Senate Democrat taking shots at the package. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) warned that if the talks produce a gasoline tax of 6 cents a gallon or more, as many expect, “you’d begin to lose senators who had supported the bill.”

To meet their deficit-reduction target, Baucus said, the negotiators should be looking for cuts that they could make in Clinton’s proposed tax breaks for small business investing, inner-city development and poor working families.

His comments demonstrated how thin a line the negotiators are walking: The very items that he mentioned as expendable are the ones that many liberals say are critical to their support.

Boren, who has threatened repeatedly to vote against the plan in its various stages, has been an irritant to the Administration and Senate leadership for months. Moreover, his vocal criticism from within the ranks has made it more difficult for the Administration and congressional leaders to write off criticism of the plan as mere carping from the Republicans.

To break the filibuster on the national service program, the Administration has offered to scale it back to $300 million for the first year, $500 million in the second and $700 million in the third year, according to an Administration official. “That is our bottom line,” the official said.

The plan originally proposed to Congress started at $394 million the first year and rose to $3.4 billion in the fifth year.

But Republican senators have drawn their own line. They do not want to authorize funding for any more than two years.

Times staff writers Elizabeth Shogren and James Risen contributed to this story.