NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Presidency Seems Stuck on the Roller Coaster : Politics: White House keeps moving from one ‘crisis’ to the next. Observers blame a tough agenda and last-minute decision-making.

“We never really get a chance to savor our wins,” Mandy Grunwald, an adviser to President Clinton, mused this week.

For the immediate future, at least, her comment reflected a painful reality for the Clinton White House: Despite an impressive congressional victory on the North America Free Trade Agreement and a strong performance at the Pacific Rim summit here, Clinton’s presidency is still on a roller coaster.

A pattern of come-from-behind victories followed almost immediately by yet another major test has defined Clinton’s tenure so far, and it does not appear about to end.

Even as White House operatives prowled the corridors of the Capitol to nail down final votes for the trade accord Wednesday, senior Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos and Budget Director Leon E. Panetta were lobbying members of Congress over a potentially crucial House vote on the federal budget. The vote is likely to come Monday--and, once again, Clinton is starting out behind.

In his public remarks after the trade vote Thursday, Clinton barely looked back at the victory before talking about two fights coming next year--the quest for health care reform and his proposal for replacing the current unemployment insurance system with a new program of worker retraining.

Passage of the trade agreement is “just the first step,” Clinton said, as he urged “the coalition that passed NAFTA to help me” in the next round of legislative efforts.

White House aides say they hope that a week of successes will provide the President substantial new stature and leverage. The trade vote, said presidential counselor David Gergen, “sends a very positive signal that this President is willing to fight. That’s an important signal to send to the rest of the world, and I think it’s also an important political signal back home.”

Still, the pattern of continual struggles has proved to be a major problem for Clinton, giving the public the sense of a constantly embattled President.

The effect shows up in polls, which have shown public approval of Clinton drifting gradually upward most of this fall but which also show the toll of the constant battles. The surveys tend to show substantial majorities in favor of Clinton’s policy goals but doubts about his ability to achieve them.

And public doubts about his leadership ability strongly correlate with overall views of Clinton’s performance.

Clinton’s roller-coaster Administration has many causes.

Republicans who worked with the White House on the trade battle said they gained new respect for the ability of Clinton’s team and for the President’s own skill as a legislative horse-trader. But, they added, the nature of the Clinton presidency makes things harder for the White House.

“Once they get geared up and everybody’s committed, they’re fairly impressive,” said a former George Bush Administration official involved in the trade fight. “But it takes too long, sometimes, for them to realize what they need to do.”

Clinton’s aides, for their part, pointed repeatedly not only to the number of things he has pledged to accomplish but also to their difficulty--raising taxes to reduce the federal budget deficit, boosting free trade at a time of economic insecurity and revamping the nation’s entire health care system.

The argument has considerable validity, scholars say. “It’s hard to think of another President who has taken on so many tough issues this early,” said William Leuchtenberg, a presidential historian and biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Making matters even more difficult is the fact that Clinton, elected with only 43% of the vote, must create a majority coalition afresh with each new issue.

In last summer’s budget battle, for example, Clinton created a coalition of liberal and moderate Democrats--leaving aside all Republicans and many conservative Democrats--to form a bare majority. On the trade agreement, Clinton knew that he would lose most of his party’s liberal and labor-oriented members of Congress and would, therefore, have to form a coalition of Democratic and Republican moderates.

Those two coalitions could not exist at the same time, forcing Clinton to delay his campaign for the trade pact until after the budget vote, noted one senior Clinton aide.

“If we had started talking about NAFTA in July, you could have kissed the budget goodby. Impossible,” the aide said. “Was an active NAFTA campaign going to bring Republican votes on the budget? I don’t think so.”

In turn, however, that calculation all but guaranteed that opponents of the trade accord would get a major head start in the debate, meaning that Clinton would have to fight from behind.

Those constraints of policy and political reality do not entirely explain the roller-coaster nature of the Clinton tenure. Even close aides concede that part of the explanation lies in the personality of the President--a man who discovered as a youngster that he was smart enough to ace the final exam without studying until the night before and who has followed a similar pattern ever since.

Clinton prefers ad hoc working groups to structured hierarchies. He resists making decisions until he must--supporters prefer to say he likes to keep his options open as long as he can. He seldom completes work on a major speech or policy until the last minute. And he often springs ideas on his advisers with little notice--much in contrast to Bush, who preferred to have aides bring options to him rather than initiate them himself.

Many Clinton aides hotly defend the President’s operating style. “These sorts of questions really tick me off,” one said. “Look at what we’ve gotten done. It may not fit well onto an organization chart, but it’s working.”

Others, however, said Clinton’s way of organizing his own time and his White House have posed problems.

“They need to get away from the war-room mentality,” said one official. “They have got to be able to handle several things without each one becoming a crisis. That’s what they haven’t done.”

Clinton Scorecard

Some of President Clinton’s major victories and defeats in Congress:

VICTORIES

* House approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement, with Senate approval anticipated.

* Approval of budget legislation intended to reduce federal deficits by $496 billion over five years by raising taxes and restraining the pace of spending increases.

* Approval of a national service program to allow students to trade public service work for college tuition.

* Approval of the “motor-voter” law to simplify voter registration.

* Approval of family-leave legislation guaranteeing employees of larger companies the right to take unpaid leave for family emergencies.

DEFEATS

* Failure to get a multibillion-dollar package of spending in an economic stimulus initiative offered as part of the fiscal 1994 budget submission.

* Failure to save the $11 billion superconducting super collider.

* Failure to win congressional backing for his proposal for an outright lifting of the ban on gays in the military.

Source: Associated Press