Clinton to Push His Agenda at a Slower Pace

Faced with a tired and potentially rebellious Congress, President Clinton and his top aides have decided to slow the pace of the Administration’s ambitious legislative agenda--particularly plans for health care reform, according to White House officials.

Nonetheless, Clinton insisted in an interview, quick action on several measures would still be the best way for Washington to improve its image with the American people.

“I know they (legislators) are tired,” Clinton told The Times. “But they ought to draw energy from the tasks ahead.”

Future issues will not be as bitter or partisan as the budget, he insisted. “I think it will get better for the Congress. It will still be hard work, but it won’t be such heavy lifting,” he said.

The stretching-out of the agenda will be most notable on health care, where even the President is conceding that he will not be able to achieve his goal of passing a sweeping reform package this year. Clinton aides say they hope for a congressional vote late next summer.

“We hope to have a vote in time to send members of Congress home in 1994” for their fall reelection campaigns, said a senior White House official. “Either give (their constituents) a vote on health care or make it clear whose fault it is that there hasn’t been one.”

While Clinton plans to introduce his health care package in a nationally televised speech, tentatively slated for the third week of September, he will not initially send a specific legislative proposal to Capitol Hill.

Instead, aides said, he plans to emphasize general “principles,” much as he did during the late stage of the debate over the federal budget, while White House aides work behind the scenes to craft the details.

The idea, said the senior official, is to “avoid getting bogged down in the legislative morass” and keep Clinton out of the situation he faced early in the budget debate, where he was so tied to specific proposals that every change enacted by Congress was reported either as an Administration defeat or concession.

By contrast with the bruising fight over the budget, the debate on health care and other issues should be less partisan and divisive, Clinton said.

On health care, in particular, he said, “all the research shows the American people are very sophisticated about this issue as it affects them.” Because of that, “we’ve got a chance to reduce the ‘spook factor’ here. I think it will be harder to stampede people one way or the other.”

“It will be harder for me to stampede people into just embracing the plan we put forward too,” he added. “But that’s good.”

Clinton conceded that he may face a harder time obtaining a “reasoned debate” on the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, which he is expected to submit to Congress soon now that the three nations have completed side agreements on environmental and labor standards.

Despite the fact that he has recently gone through the acrimonious budget battle and the suicide of close friend and aide Vincent Foster, Clinton appeared relaxed and upbeat in the interview aboard Air Force One.

“You’ve got to be willing to go through the hills and valleys” in political life, Clinton said. “I just kind of get up and go to work every day and I think it will all turn out all right.”

“So far I’ve been right” he said with a smile.

The process of getting results in Washington “is a little tougher than I thought it was going to be, but not much tougher,” he said. “Changing things is hard. If it were easy, people would be doing it all the time.”

The budget debate was a fight that he and Congress simply could not have avoided, he said. “We just had to prove to ourselves and our allies that we could get control over our destinies again. Then we could operate from a position of strength. It is so much easier to enlarge your vision or change your course or do anything once you’ve got some markers in the ground.”

“If we hadn’t done this,” he said, “everything we would have tried to do after that would have been tainted and sort of limited by it.

“We had a foundation to lay down, and it couldn’t have been popular because you had to change too many things.”

With that debate behind him, Clinton said, he now hopes to win passage of the scaled-down version of his national service plan during the first week of September. He will also urge Congress to complete action on lobbying disclosure, campaign financing and the anti-crime package he endorsed earlier in the week, he said.

Passage of those bills “can drastically increase the support for individual members and the institution” of Congress by showing voters that the government can take action to respond to public demands, Clinton said.

Action on such measures would also, of course, help the President’s own standing, which has remained relatively low in recent polls, although not nearly as low as the general perception of Congress.

But Clinton insisted that he remains far more sanguine about his position than others.

“I’m not in the same position” as members of Congress, he said. “They have to run next year (and) there’s a general cynicism about politicians and about Congress in particular.”

But if Congress is willing to act, he said, “we have a chance to make this one of the most productive sessions of Congress the American people have ever had.”

“I’m really hopeful about it.”