NEWS ANALYSIS : President Fixes Gaze on History and Electorate

Health care, crime, welfare reform and foreign affairs all had their appointed places in President Clinton’s State of the Union Address Tuesday night, but the speech was above all a testament to the evolving and expanding ambition of the man who delivered it.

From his youth, Bill Clinton was goaded by a personal drive to achieve the office he now holds. As President, he has displayed an equally powerful but markedly more expansive ambition: to use the Oval Office to put his stamp on the entire nation.

If George Bush always betrayed the sense that the presidency was the end to which he had struggled, Clinton made clear Tuesday night that he has come to see the Oval Office as a means, not an end. His address was a catalogue tour of just how vast a presidency he desires.

But it was also a tacit reminder that he has found it far easier to translate broad visions into rhetoric than into results. As in other speeches, Clinton could and did glide past the inherent tensions in his broad agenda--between the need to cut the budget, for example, and the need to spend more money if his calls for reforming welfare and rescuing children from poverty are to be more than token gestures.

Last year, he could not square that circle: In a public environment skeptical of new spending, Congress focused on deficit reduction and significantly scaled back his investment agenda.

Tuesday night, Clinton declared he will try once again.

He called first of all for health care reform. Then swift completion of the massive crime bill. To be followed by welfare reform--only recently consigned to policy limbo by White House aides who feared it would clog the legislative arteries. Not to mention a new job training program and education reform and urban revitalization. And a national information superhighway--laid down in legislation, this year, too.

Not neglecting foreign affairs, he had a blueprint for his own new world order built around promoting democracy and open markets around the globe.

For good measure, he passionately urged a reconsecration of American values. “Our problems go way beyond the reach of government,” Clinton declared. “The American people have got to change within, if we are to bring back work, family and community.”

These are all ideas Clinton has long championed. But by any standard, they represent the impatient wish-list of a man with one eye on the history books, the other on the electoral calendar.

“We have a very small window to initiate change,” one Cabinet secretary said Tuesday. “In terms of the initial design and implementation of these programs, there isn’t very much time. That sense is spread throughout the Administration.”

What unifies Clinton’s insistent ambitions is his drive to create a new construct for American politics--a realignment not only in electoral loyalties but in the guiding principles for government. Through all his ups and downs, Clinton has never wavered from one central belief: the conviction that he can thread a “third way” between the “false choices” of traditional liberal and conservative dogma.

To Clinton and many of his advisers, building that bridge across the political divides of the past quarter century remains the key to constructing both a reelection majority and a public consensus behind the activist government the President hopes to lead.

But the inherent tensions within his program make that effort a constant struggle.

Once again this year, Clinton must struggle to reconcile his two overriding economic goals: reducing the deficit and increasing public investment on such programs as education and training.

The still-widespread emphasis on deficit reduction has forced Clinton to phase in all of his cherished programs more slowly than he had hoped. And the caps imposed on discretionary domestic spending last year mean that he will only be able to increase his “investment” spending to the extent that he can push cuts in other programs through Congress.

“I’m not saying it’s going to be easier (to fund the investment agenda) in 1994,” acknowledged William A. Galston, deputy director of domestic policy in the White House. “It’s going to be harder in many respects.”

On the other top domestic issues, Clinton must manage the second principal tension in his “third way” approach: bridging the often divergent interests of his liberal Democratic base and the moderate voters he hopes to attract in 1996.

On crime, for example, Clinton now faces intensifying pressure from the left and right. Last year, he endorsed expansion of the death penalty and funding for 100,000 new police officers--ideas with considerable appeal to moderates. Republicans promptly put him on the spot by drawing a different dividing line, calling for tougher sentences and more prisons.

Tuesday night, in a move certain to anger many liberals, Clinton moved toward that new line by endorsing the so-called “three strikes, you’re out” provision that would impose life imprisonment without parole on criminals found guilty of a federal felony after two previous felony convictions.

Even before he spoke, however, he found himself one-upped by the GOP: House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) last Friday demanded a two strikes provision for violent criminals even though the crime bill sponsored by nearly 90 House Republicans, including Gingrich himself, contains a three strikes provision.

The welfare debate could see a similar dynamic, with each Clinton proposal to impose new responsibilities on welfare recipients trumped by even sterner Republican proposals that attempt to force the President to choose between his fellow Democrats in Congress and the larger public.

This intricate byplay with the GOP pulls Clinton’s tightrope ever tauter. Already, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, the Congressional Black Caucus and House liberals are complaining that the crime bill passed overwhelmingly by the Senate last November tilts too heavily toward punishment; they want Clinton to repudiate it.

Similarly, House liberals already have signaled that they will fight the call for a two-year time limit on welfare that Clinton repeated in his speech; fear of provoking another tussle with the left is one reason the White House has hesitated to introduce the plan.

On health care, Clinton faces the opposite problem: extensive resistance from moderate and conservative Democrats. Many centrist Democrats view his complex health care plan--with its vast new federal and state bureaucracies and a new federal entitlement to health care--as fundamentally incompatible with his calls for fiscal prudence and streamlining government.

This sort of ideological cross-fire, with liberals and conservatives simultaneously sniping at him over different issues, has become an occupational hazard for Clinton. It may be unavoidable for a President who zigs and zags along the ideological demilitarized zone that has long divided the parties.

Still, amid all the flak and tensions, Clinton’s third way agenda has begun to yield tangible successes. As Clinton recounted Tuesday night, he forged bipartisan coalitions last year behind national service, aid to Russia and the North American Free Trade Agreement. And despite all the ideological jostling, sometime this spring Clinton is almost certain to end years of gridlock by signing a crime bill that offers more cops and more prisons, more gun control and more social programs--in effect marrying the alternatives over which conservatives and liberals have long feuded.

On welfare, he could ultimately build a similar coalition in the center, joining liberal calls for more training and education with conservative demands for personal responsibility and work.

The shift of the political spotlight toward crime and welfare should help Clinton fortify his standing with voters in the political center. But some Democrats fear that the debate over health care could cut in the opposite direction.

During last year’s budget fight, Clinton was seriously wounded with centrist voters when a parade of moderate Democrats seconded Republican criticisms of the plan as too heavy on taxes. A similar pattern appears to be developing on health care, with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) questioning the Administration’s underlying assumption of a health care crisis.

In his State of the Union speech, Clinton showed no sign of retreat, declaring explicitly that he would veto any bill that “does not guarantee every American private health insurance that can never be taken away.”

Many electoral tacticians in both parties believe that the safest political step for Clinton is to seek a diluted compromise on health care that would allow him to avoid a polarizing fight and claim victory on a central campaign promise. That route might boost his prospects of reelection in 1996--and protect his personal ambition to remain at the pinnacle of power.

But, as his remarks Tuesday night suggested, that would not satisfy his ambition to leave a lasting imprint on the nation. In the months ahead--on health care and on the rest of his enormous agenda--bridging those two strains of his own ambition may be the most difficult challenge the President faces.