NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Casts Congress in Old Role of the Evil Empire: A Wrestled Bear

For a generation, presidents could sell themselves largely on the basis of one issue: how well they handled the Russians. But with Cold War tensions having faded, President Clinton has had to search for a new organizing principle for his public appeals.

Now the President and his advisers have settled on such a theme: While past presidents could handle Moscow, this one can handle Congress.

That approach will ring hollow if Clinton’s major initiatives, particularly his ambitious health care reform plan, run aground in Congress. His record with Congress to date, although it contains major victories on the North American Free Trade Agreement and efforts to reduce the federal budget deficit, has not persuaded the public that Washington has really changed its ways.

For that reason, with Congress returning to work today, the next several weeks on Capitol Hill could be of great importance to Clinton.

This week, the President plans a series of events to pressure lawmakers for action on a crime bill, which Administration officials had hoped to see signed into law by now. After that, Clinton’s health care proposals, having made some progress in the first stages of legislative action, face key votes in two House committees.

At the same time, Clinton’s budget, separate versions having passed the House and Senate in record time, still must go through a conference committee to reconcile differences between the two bills. The Senate is asking for deeper spending cuts, which would jeopardize the domestic programs Clinton favors.

With all that, Clinton’s declarations on the health care campaign trail may seem a bit premature.

“If you look at what’s happened in the last year, there has been a pretty big change in the way things work in Washington,” Clinton said Friday as he spoke to an audience in Minneapolis. Clinton added that he and his congressional supporters “were willing to risk their political necks to make tough decisions, to stop talking about problems and start doing something about them.”

Those words, which Clinton repeated constantly over the last week, reflect a belief on the part of his advisers, particularly pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, that a President’s ability to handle Congress has more than ever become a crucial dimension that voters use in measuring a chief executive’s worth.

In that view, former President George Bush adopted precisely the wrong approach during the 1992 campaign when he blamed Congress for his Administration’s inability to produce a response to the nation’s economic problems. Although Bush hoped to capitalize on Congress’ unpopularity, Clinton’s aides said voters simply decided Bush was not up to the job.

That does not mean Americans like Congress but rather that they expect to see Congress act as the repository of all the nation’s warring special interests and the President to prevent those interests from causing gridlock.

For that reason, Clinton aides were deeply concerned last summer that a failure to pass his budget could leave his presidency crippled. For the same reason, they worry that steady Republican opposition to his other proposals, particularly health care reform, could badly sour voters’ view of the President.

As he tries to prevent that from happening, Clinton has begun seeking to milk as much as possible from each congressional victory--a contrast with last year when, aides complained, he often moved so fast from one fight to the next that even when he won he failed to receive much credit.

“Last year, this Congress, working with me, adopted a budget that brought the deficits down,” Clinton told his audiences last week. That budget will “give us the first three years of declining deficits since Harry S. Truman was President of the United States of America.”

Congress, he went on to say, was “on a record pace” to adopt a new budget for this year, had already passed a major education measure and was working on legislation dealing with crime, unemployment and, of course, health care.

At the same time, Clinton seeks to cast his congressional opponents as practitioners of ideologically driven partisan politics and his supporters as pragmatists just trying to “get things done.”

“It’s pretty simple what our strategy is: Get people together, get things done, move the country forward, give people the chance to live up to their potential,” Clinton said in his speech Friday. “I think you hired me to deal with the hard problems. So we’re trying to deal with them.”

By contrast, he said, some of his opponents try to use each issue “as yet another opportunity to take a proposal and push it to the ideological extremes, forgetting all about the reality of the tens of millions of people’s lives that are at stake.”

So far, polls indicate that Clinton’s approach has had mixed success. A Gallup Poll question asking whether Clinton “works well with Congress” has received steadily rising positive responses over the last year. In January, the last time Gallup asked the question, 72% said Clinton did, while 21% said he did not.

At the same time, when asked if Washington was making significant progress against the nation’s problems, respondents to several polls, including one by The Times, provide less positive answers. A 55% majority in a December Times poll, for example, said Washington was making “only some” progress.

Clinton strategists, however, say they believe that those numbers will move steadily upward if two things happen: the nation’s economy continues to show steady growth and Clinton wins on a few more of his major initiatives, most importantly on health care.