NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Hopes for Better Coordination With GOP : Politics: President to involve Republicans at outset of negotiations on health care reform and free trade pact.

President Clinton, with the bruising budget fight behind him and major new battles over trade and health care reform about to begin, is developing a strategy to cope with a political process that Republicans and Democrats alike say has grown meaner and more bitterly partisan than at any time in their memory.

In the cutthroat struggles that saw his economic stimulus program fail and his deficit reduction package barely survive, the President tried to go it alone with the Democratic majorities in Congress, virtually ignoring Republicans. The strategy backfired: Republicans, already pressured by their leaders to stand together, opposed Clinton with unprecedented unity.

Unable to build majorities among centrists from both parties, the White House had to zigzag back and forth, offering a spending cut here and a spending increase there as it bargained desperately for Democratic fringe votes.

Recognizing that he cannot afford another such ordeal, Administration officials said, Clinton will now try to work with Republicans from the outset on health care reform and the North American Free Trade Agreement--two politically explosive issues on which Democrats are deeply divided.

Already, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, head of the Administration’s health care reform task force, has spent considerable time consulting with Republicans on the issue. In addition, the President has said he plans to name more Republicans to his Administration, and aides said he is considering naming a Republican to a key role on health care.

Whether the President’s belated attempt to reach out to the opposition will work is far from clear. The battles of the past seven months have left their scars; Republicans may rebuff any Clinton overtures as opportunistic. Moreover, substantive and political differences between the parties on these issues are not easy to reconcile.

Casting a shadow over the whole process is the extraordinary level of rancor and mean-spiritedness that now pervades the political process in Washington.

“We must have a change in the bitter partisanship if government is going to work,” said David Gergen, the former aide to three Republican presidents who recently signed on as counselor to Clinton. “It’s been extraordinary not to have Republican support on the budget. It’s never happened before. The lesson of the stimulus package defeat was that you must have bipartisanship on major issues.”

Gergen is not alone in believing that the political atmosphere has grown more “poisonous” in recent years and now is a major obstacle to dealing with national problems.

Partisanship is “much more viciously personal today,” according to political scientist Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s become a little like ‘The War of the Roses,’ ” he said, referring to a movie depicting savage, escalating fights between a husband and wife in the midst of a divorce.

“After a while, the whole thing gets so focused on screwing the other guy that anything else--cooperation or even civility--goes out the window.”

Longtime activists in both parties say they share that view, though each side tends to point the finger at the other.

Former Republican Party Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. blames much of the meanness on bitterly negative presidential campaigns. He said partisanship intensified this year when Democrats came to power after 12 years of GOP rule “with a screw-the-Republicans attitude that made them fighting mad.”

Other Republicans accused Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) of engaging in ruthless, behind-the-scenes maneuvering--even before Clinton’s election--that still rankles the GOP.

Although quiet and relatively soft-spoken in public, Mitchell was described by Republicans as “tough and mean” in his tactics during formulation of the 1990 federal budget accord, in which President George Bush abandoned his “no new taxes” pledge before Democrats would support the rest of his proposal.

For their part, Democrats and even some Republicans said Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) has been unusually sharp-tongued and confrontational because he harbors ambitions to run for President in 1996. Even some Republicans say they disapprove of Dole’s hard-edged partisanship.

One who served as a top aide to Bush said: “I’m surprised Dole is that vitriolic. It’s just not healthy for the body politic, for the parties or for the people.”

Former Democratic Party Chairman John White said “the mean-spiritedness” of today’s Washington is best exemplified by the venomous debate in the House last month when Democrats rejected Republican demands to release documents from an internal investigation of the House post office.

Democrats said the Justice Department opposed the move on nonpolitical grounds, fearing release of the documents could jeopardize prosecution of possible wrongdoers.

But Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) declared that the claim was made in bad faith. He accused House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) of soliciting a letter from the Justice Department making the point. After an angry Foley took to the House floor and vehemently denied that he had solicited the letter, Thomas felt compelled to apologize, but the incident left scars on both sides of the aisle.

“This town didn’t used to be this way,” said White, who was agriculture secretary in the Jimmy Carter Administration. “Now, in addition to all the nastiness in Congress, there are all these bad rumors floating about Bill Clinton and Hillary and their private lives--they’re obscene, obnoxious and untrue. There used to be some respect for the office of President and the person who held the office.”

Washington has been rife with rumors about the Clintons and other Administration figures--including Vincent Foster, deputy White House counsel and a Clinton family friend who shot himself in an apparent suicide in July.

Foster apparently was depressed, in part over a series of Wall Street Journal editorials scathingly criticizing his work and that of the counsel’s office.

Several commentators have criticized the Journal’s editorials, but the newspaper published another editorial Friday dismissing suggestions that “we pulled the trigger” and declared: “What we said about Mr. Foster was nothing compared to the abuse heaped on the likes of Ed Meese, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.”

In a striking indication of Washington’s highly charged atmosphere, a record number of House members--44--resigned last year, many citing Washington’s sour mood, legislative gridlock, growing public scorn and the news media’s preoccupation with scandal.

The public mood is reflected in recent polls giving Congress a paltry approval rating of about 25%. The most recent Times Mirror poll shows that 57% of the public believe that partisan antagonisms between the parties grew worse this year.

Clinton decried the political divisiveness in a recent interview with The Times, saying: “I don’t think the American people like it. And I just have to keep trying to reach out to overcome it and do the best I can.”

He did make one personal effort to reach out to Dole after the stimulus package debacle. Clinton hosted a dinner for the minority leader at a Washington restaurant to discuss matters that former Democratic Party Chairman Robert S. Strauss said were “of mutual interest.”

Strauss helped arrange the meeting with Dole, an old friend, after Clinton told him that he wanted to improve his relationship with the senator.

“I think these things help,” said Strauss, who attended the dinner meeting. “It doesn’t mean anybody will sacrifice any principles. They talked about things they have in common. They didn’t have to talk about differences.”

But it is the differences that still dominate the relationship.

White House aides said it is with Republican encouragement that Clinton considering naming a Republican as co-coordinator of his campaign for health care reform.

That would be a major change for an Administration that earlier this year ignored the work of a GOP group that has met regularly with Sen. John H. Chaffee (R-R.I.), a moderate, to draw up Republican proposals for health care reform.

During the presidential campaign, Clinton promised that he would appoint Republicans if elected and renewed that pledge during a particularly rocky period this spring.

Almost no GOP appointments have actually been made, but Clinton said he still intends to follow through. Naming Gergen has been “great” for his Administration, he said, and “I’ve still got (several others) on my list I intend to get in here before I’m done.”

If the goal of such appointments is to reduce partisan tensions, Clinton’s experience so far is not encouraging.

Far from welcoming the appointment of Gergen and the Administration’s only other top GOP official--Roger Johnson, an Orange County businessman who heads the General Services Administration--Republicans denounced them in scathing terms.

Dole was especially critical of Gergen, who served in the Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan administrations.

In recent years, some Democrats also have demanded total partisan loyalty. Strauss said that after Bush appointed him as ambassador to the former Soviet Union, “as old and sophisticated as I am, I was stunned at the number of people who said: ‘How could you remain a Democrat and work for a Republican Administration.’ ”

In years past, Washington considered such signs of bipartisanship to be routine, even laudable. In 1977, there was no grumbling from the GOP when James R. Schlesinger, a top Republican official in the Nixon and Ford administrations, accepted Carter’s appointment as energy secretary.

Schlesinger recalled that later, when he went to Carter with a list of possible presidential appointees in the Energy Department and noted that several were Republicans, Carter replied: “Let’s take the best ones, party affiliation doesn’t matter.”

“Back then, there was some kind of paramount national interest in Washington, and party affiliation took second place,” Schlesinger said. “It’s just much different now.”

Regardless of the personalities involved, leading activists of both parties said several factors figure in the polarization, including:

* Republicans hammering Democrats with the “tax and spend” label since 1984 when Democratic presidential nominee Walter F. Mondale said a tax increase would be necessary. In the same vein, Democrats have assailed Republicans since the early 1980s over Reagan’s suggestion for limiting Social Security payments.

* Partisan fighting for a larger slice of an economic pie that has grown smaller as a result of a sluggish economy and an era of runaway federal budget deficits.

* Sound-bite posturing that focuses on confrontation to attract television coverage.

* Politicians more interested in being reelected to jobs that carry with them good money and many perks than engaging in bipartisan efforts to solve problems.

* Using the independent counsel law to bring criminal proceedings in some cases that might more appropriately be resolved through the political process.

* Bruising Senate confirmation proceedings, such as those that saw Democratic senators attack Supreme Court nominees Bork and Thomas and Republicans retaliate by harshly attacking Anita Faye Hill, the law professor who accused Thomas of sexual harassment. Such tactics have been used against some Clinton nominees, including Surgeon General-designate Joycelyn Elders.

* Election campaigns that use rumors and false charges to destroy an opponent’s credibility.

* The news media’s concentration on controversy, confrontation and character assaults--sometimes to the exclusion of substantive issues--in covering Washington.

In Johnson’s view, moderate Republicans would agree privately that many things that Clinton is proposing are needed and necessary, but they are afraid to buck the party line.

“They believe their leaders’ rhetoric that Clinton is a four-year President,” he said, “and no one, assuming that logic, wants to oppose the party leadership.”

Republican leaders, while agreeing that partisanship has become more bitter, insist that their opposition to Clinton is based on policy differences. “It’s lamentable that the political game is more personal and uncivil today,” said GOP Chairman Haley Barbour. “But we oppose the President on policy grounds--his views are so far removed from our principles of economic policy.”

However, Barbour said Clinton can get significant GOP support on health care reform and the trade treaty if he works with Republicans, and he said compromises can be worked out on crucial issues.

“There’s a lot of Republican support for (the trade pact),” he said, “and Republicans want health care reform.”

“But what should it be?” asked Barbour, adding a caveat at the heart of the differences: “Our fear is that the Administration will propose government-run health care and huge new taxes on health care, and those are two things Republicans will oppose.”

However, several moderate Senate Republicans said Clinton can win GOP support on both health care reform and the trade issue if the Administration negotiates with Republicans from the outset.

Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.) said Clinton could have saved his economic stimulus package from death by filibuster if he had been willing to negotiate with moderate Republicans who disagreed with Dole’s hard-line policy of opposing a tax increase of any kind.

“We were willing to accept some kind of tax increase if we could reach a compromise on other parts of the package,” he said, adding that he disagrees with an increasing number of Republicans who “just want to oppose Clinton.”

Times staff writer Karen Tumulty contributed to this story.

* ANGRY LAWMAKERS: White House pressure to support the budget package has irked some in the House. A16