NEWS ANALYSIS : Year After Election, Clinton Alters His View of Change : Presidency: His first months in office have provided hard lessons about political obstacles, personal style.

One year ago this week, William Jefferson Clinton won election as the 42nd President of the United States by promising change.

“When you get right down to it, the choice is as old as America, a choice between more of the same and fundamental change,” Clinton said in a speech a few days before last year’s vote. “The American people have to decide that the only way to get security in this time is to embrace change, to make it our friend.”

Twelve months later, much has changed--including Clinton’s way of discussing his favorite subject.

He still talks about the inevitability of change and the need to “make change our friend,” but a darker note has crept into his rhetoric. At a recent speech at the University of North Carolina, Clinton put it this way: “All around our great country today, I see people resisting change. I see them turning inward and away from change.”

Clinton’s shift in language about change, friends and close advisers say, reflects a clear shift in his outlook: A year after his election, more than nine months into his presidency, Clinton has begun to recognize--and to be reconciled to--how truly difficult change can be.

To those familiar with Washington’s policy-making gridlock, that lesson may seem obvious. But “there is a difference between your intellectually understanding how difficult it will be and then your experiencing it,” said Clinton’s chief of staff, Thomas (Mack) McLarty.

It is precisely Clinton’s lack of experience, many of his critics argue, that has been his greatest problem in the year since his election--a point some of the President’s top aides now concede.

Repeatedly, on issues from homosexuals in the military at the beginning of the year to health care reform now, the White House has put forward proposals and then, due to errors in execution, struggled to control the debate.

The result has often threatened to forfeit the President’s chief power, which is to define a national agenda.

Clinton’s own lack of experience contributed heavily to what many aides now see as a crucial early error--his intense, almost single-minded focus between the election and the inauguration on picking his Cabinet. He largely ignored major policy decisions and questions of how to structure the White House.

The key meeting on shaping Clinton’s budget plans, for example, did not take place until Jan. 7, 1992, less than two weeks before the inauguration. That ensured that Clinton would not have an economic plan in place when he took office and would, therefore, have little to say on the issue at the time when the country was paying most attention to him.

Military officials and their congressional allies took advantage by focusing attention instead on the issue of homosexuals in the military.

“The focus on the Cabinet really was a problem when we took office. There really was nothing else in place,” said one longtime Clinton adviser. “That was a misstep.”

Despite all that, in the year since his election Clinton has achieved some of the many changes he sought on his lengthy agenda:

* He has raised taxes on upper-income Americans, thus reversing the central economic policy of his two predecessors and slowing the growth of the federal budget deficit.

* He has launched a health care reform effort that seems to have at least a fighting chance of achieving the long-delayed liberal goal of universal health care coverage for Americans.

* He has staffed the upper reaches of his Administration in a way that largely meets his pledge of a government that “looks like America.”

“This is the first Cabinet in history where white males are a minority,” said historian William Leuchtenberg. “The whole texture of the government seems different.”

But the President, who won election with only 43% of the vote, has failed so far to bring about the most basic change: a reduction in the pervasive American mistrust of government that would allow him to consolidate a new majority for his party and his activist agenda.

The battles he faces to achieve that goal show no signs of getting easier.

The organization Clinton has put together to fight those battles reflects--as White Houses always do--the personality of the President. The Clinton White House is a place of informality, sometimes to the point of indiscipline; a forum for new ideas, sometimes to the point of ideological incoherence, and above all, a place of seemingly endless meetings.

Senior Clinton aides have become used to a schedule that begins at 7 a.m. and extends to meetings that often do not even start until 8 or 9 p.m. as officials seek to comply with the President’s desire to have all viewpoints aired and all interested parties heard before a decision is reached.

The process has given the Administration a more collegial tone than its predecessors; on very few issues have government agencies gone public with complaints that their views are not being heard.

But the search for harmony has also been a cause for endless frustration.

“It’s time-consuming,” said a senior government official who has served in several administrations. “It’s frustrating to see almost non-structured meetings, almost non-chaired and almost non-determinative. You can come out scratching your head and saying: ‘Was anything decided here?’ ”

But, the official said, Clinton has begun to rein in that process, in part by moving away from his insistence on consensus--an approach that effectively forced all remaining disagreements up to his desk--in favor of allowing his subordinates to make more decisions themselves.

Clinton also appears to have adjusted to the culture of his capital--an environment far different from the one he had been used to as governor of Arkansas.

The adjustments have come on matters both large and small. In Arkansas, for example, “putting on airs” was a major political sin, and Clinton often seemed uncomfortable with the trappings of his office during his early months as President.

During the first several months of the presidency, for example, he would appear with little fanfare at rallies or other events simply by stepping on stage from behind a curtain.

Presidential counselor David Gergen changed that shortly after joining the White House staff this summer. Now when Clinton appears at an event, a band is usually on hand to strike up “Hail to the Chief.”

On a more profound level, Clinton, who came from a state with an almost completely one-party political culture, seemed for the first several months of his presidency to be flummoxed by the intensely partisan nature of Washington debates--the way that members of the opposition party oppose a President’s proposals almost as a matter of routine.

Clinton also appeared unprepared for the degree of opposition he would face within his own party from legislators not at all accustomed to taking direction from the White House.

At the time of the election, many within Clinton’s inner circle--and perhaps the President himself--seemed convinced that government paralysis had been caused mostly by the confrontation between a Republican President and a Democratic Congress.

Eliminate that divided government, they hoped, and the officials “would welcome an opportunity to step forward and throw off some of the gridlock,” said Clinton’s longtime friend, University of Arkansas political scientist Diane Blair.

When that did not happen, Clinton’s frustration frequently boiled over into flashes of temper expressed in Oval Office meetings, late-night telephone calls to aides and, on occasion, public speeches.

Shortly before Clinton began his summer vacation in August, for example, he spoke to the National Governors’ Assn. meeting in Tulsa, Okla., complaining of how difficult it was to get anything accomplished.

“Many of the skills which are highly prized among you”--skills of conciliation, compromise and pragmatism--”those skills are not only not very much prized, sometimes they’re absolutely demeaned in the nation’s capital,” Clinton told the governors. “Consensus is often turned into cave-in; people who try to work together and listen to one another instead of beat each other up are accused of being weak, not strong. And the process is a hundred times more important than the product.”

Last summer marked the low point of the year for the President, as he struggled to gain the final votes for his budget while coping with the suicide of his close friend and lawyer, Vincent Foster.

When he came back from his subsequent vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., the bitterness was gone. He had a new set of themes for his speeches--including new lines about the difficulty of change--and an apparent reconciliation to some of the difficulties he faced.

The vacation was “a coming-to-peace experience” for Clinton, said Robert E. Rubin, the White House economic policy chief. “He seems to have reflected on what he was doing, what he ought to be doing (and he) thought about it, thought his way through things.”

In the weeks since then, Clinton has seemed notably calmer. Instead of complaining in speeches about the difficulties he faces, he now shrugs them off.

In a recent speech, ostensibly designed to rally support for the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement, Clinton indulged in his habit of thinking out loud, revealing some of his thoughts about the challenges he faces.

“I mean, who are we to complain about this set of problems? Very few mornings do I come to work in the Oval Office and wonder about whether some decision I make can spark a nuclear war,” Clinton said, implicitly contrasting his presidency with that of his boyhood hero, John F. Kennedy. “Very few mornings do I wonder whether, even in all the difficulties we face, we might make an economic error and a quarter of our people will be out of work, as they were during the Great Depression.

“Yes, it’s a new time. It’s always difficult in a new time to see the future with clarity and to have the kind of framework you need,” he added. “These are difficult problems. But for goodness sakes, give us these problems as compared with many of those our forebears faced.”