NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton’s Successful Legislative Tactics Backfire in Whitewater : Presidency: Efforts to control the debate do not succeed with ethical questions. Instead, they increase the suspicion that there is something to hide.

With Republican pressure mounting for congressional hearings on Whitewater, it has become increasingly clear that the political skills President Clinton and his aides use effectively in campaigns and legislative fights exacerbate their difficulties when the battleground is ethics and character.

Even some Clinton supporters are beginning to think the tactics and habits of mind that make the President a difficult target for Republicans on most policy issues may be drawing a bull’s-eye across his forehead on Whitewater.

In case after case, Clinton has triumphed by controlling the terms of debate and determining the field of battle. On issues such as crime, immigration and the North American Free Trade Agreement, he has repeatedly relied on three tactics to achieve that control: He steals the opposition’s thunder by blending competing arguments. He employs flexibility to shift the point of conflict. And he attacks his critics aggressively.

But on ethical challenges, there is no real middle ground to seize and shifting ground leads to trouble. So does the aggressiveness that has marked Clinton’s approach to political combat from the outset.

“The lesson is you don’t have control over (ethics questions), so get out of the way,” Democratic consultant Brian Lunde says. “If you try to control it, it’s just like you put a hand on a burner--you’ll get burned.”

In legislative and campaign battles, Clinton often moves swiftly to co-opt new issues or lines of argument. One example: Despite widespread resistance among liberals--and division within his own Administration--Clinton swiftly endorsed “three-strikes” provisions for violent felons after it became apparent that Republicans were trying to center the crime debate on that issue.

Those same White House instincts have been apparent in the Whitewater struggle. One reason the White House dropped its opposition to a special counsel was the conclusion that the Administration could effectively resist calls for public release of Whitewater business records once they had been turned over to investigators.

Similarly, Clinton now uses the establishment of the special counsel’s office he once opposed as an argument against holding congressional hearings.

But this sort of tactical maneuvering only reinforces suspicion that the Administration has something to hide, Lunde says.

Even less applicable to ethical challenges has been the White House’s never-give-an-inch attitude toward political struggles. In two distinct respects, that approach has backfired in the Whitewater controversy.

On issues and ethical challenges alike, Clinton and his political aides operate on the assumption that no sin is greater than not punching back. From the first allegations of marital infidelity in 1992 to the allegations from state troopers last December that they helped Clinton to execute and cover up extramarital affairs, Clinton’s first instinct is to portray charges of impropriety as part of a political campaign to weaken him.

But in the Whitewater case, some senior officials acknowledge, the White House argument that political opponents are driving the issue, although not entirely without basis, has added to the perception that Clinton is reluctant to address the underlying issues.

Political adviser Paul Begala, who has delivered some of the sharpest barbs against Clinton’s critics, says that “at some times my own political response has been wrong and ill-advised.”

Even more important, Clinton has long displayed an extremely aggressive attitude toward the control of information relating to his personal affairs.

Although many political operatives maintain that the best way to deal with questions of integrity is to flood the press and political system with as much information as possible, Clinton has typically taken a more combative and lawyerly approach--providing information only when he appeared to have no other choice.

This winter, for example, the White House did not reveal for 12 days that the Clintons’ personal lawyer had negotiated a subpoena with the Justice Department intended to prevent public release of Whitewater-related files.

It also waited months to acknowledge that recently ousted Counsel Bernard Nussbaum had removed files from the office of Vincent Foster, the deputy White House counsel who authorities say committed suicide last summer. One senior White House official said this week that the decision to take those files, and not disclose it, was the critical mistake in fueling the controversy.

White House aides commonly blame these decisions on Nussbaum’s litigation-bred inclination to avoid disclosure unless absolutely necessary. But the courtroom instincts that White House colleagues have imputed to Nussbaum were also evident in Clinton’s handling of campaign controversies over the draft and his youthful use of marijuana.

During the campaign, Clinton made statements that strongly implied he had not received an induction notice for the draft in 1969, only acknowledging it when newspapers produced evidence of its existence. During the campaign, even some of Clinton’s closest aides harbored doubts over whether he was sharing with them all he knew about the draft.

Likewise, Clinton originally deflected questions about his youthful use of marijuana by insisting that he had never broken the drug laws of this country; it was only when he was asked the question in a slightly different way that he acknowledged using marijuana while in England on his Rhodes scholarship. The result was an impression of a politician more cagey than candid.

With that in mind, Whitewater critics maintain, the President’s reluctance to disclose information about Whitewater could only mean that the disclosure would damage him. “The hits they have taken to cover it up suggest to me that what is under the rug is really bad,” declared Republican strategist and former Education Secretary William J. Bennett.

White House officials offer a more benign explanation: The Clintons have resisted release of information in these controversies because they hold to the belief that significant aspects of their life should remain private.

* FORMIDABLE ADVERSARY: The GOP lawmaker pushing for Whitewater hearings has a reputation for integrity. A20