Clinton Weighs Crime Bill Concessions : Legislation: President, GOP leaders discuss possible compromises on social spending and gun provisions. Democrats hope to pick up 8 votes.

President Clinton, struggling to save the $33.2-billion crime bill, met with Republican opponents Tuesday night to discuss cuts in social spending and other concessions to win more support for legislation that has come to represent a test of his ability to break congressional gridlock.

Barely 48 hours after spurning their request for a meeting, Clinton met with House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and 12 other House Republicans to discuss possible concessions that House Democratic leaders have floated in an intensive--but so far unsuccessful--effort to gain the eight votes they need to win approval of the crime bill later this week.

Among the concessions Democrats were offering is a compromise aimed at attracting the votes of some lawmakers who oppose gun controls by relaxing restrictions on the size of the ammunition clips that could be sold under the bill’s 10-year ban on the sale and manufacture of assault-style weapons.

Other concessions aimed at prying loose Republican votes included what the Democratic leaders said would be relatively minor cuts in spending for crime prevention programs and the shifting of at least some of that money into law enforcement programs favored by the GOP.

A fiercely partisan war has raged over the crime bill since last week, when an alliance of Republican lawmakers and Democrats opposed to gun controls blocked it from coming to the House floor. Declaring a truce, Gingrich said Clinton agreed with Republican demands to cut an unspecified amount from the $7.4 billion in spending on social programs contained in the bill and to work with GOP lawmakers on other changes.

“The President indicated a very strong interest to work with us on a bipartisan basis and we’re going to honor that,” Gingrich said, adding that he now hopes to help craft a “genuinely bipartisan” compromise that could pass the House before the end of the week.

No details were agreed upon, however, and a senior White House source suggested that the Republicans were exaggerating Clinton’s concessions at the meeting. The source said the President had reiterated that he would not accept “massive cuts” in spending for the bill’s crime prevention programs.

The source added that Clinton also was firm in his insistence that the assault weapons ban remain in the bill, despite powerful opposition from the National Rifle Assn. and other gun lobby groups.

Nevertheless, Democratic sources on Capitol Hill conceded that Clinton’s efforts to compromise with the Republicans underscored what for them has been an embarrassing failure. Despite four days of extremely intense lobbying, Clinton has been unable to secure guarantees of support from any of the 58 members of his own party who deserted him on last week’s vote.

With the President’s allies agreeing that far more now is at stake for his Administration than just the crime bill, Democratic leaders sought to win at least a few votes from those who do not like gun controls by offering what they described as minor changes in the types of magazine clips that the owners of semiautomatic weapons could buy under the assault weapons provision.

Besides banning 19 specific assault weapons, the bill as originally passed by both the House and Senate would prohibit the sale of semiautomatic feeder clips holding 10 or more rounds of ammunition. “Raising that number to a higher, but still undecided, figure is one way we may be able to secure a couple of votes,” a Democratic leadership aide said.

Other proposals being floated in a daylong series of meetings between lawmakers and senior White House officials included the adoption of tougher restrictions on the parole of sexual offenders and an across-the-board cut in funds for crime prevention programs that Republicans have derided as pork-barrel spending that will have little impact on crime.

House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) continued to voice optimism Tuesday that the bill will be passed without radical alterations before the end of the week.

But in an indirect admission that the Administration’s efforts were faltering, Foley also indicated that the next vote on the crime bill is likely to be postponed from Thursday until Friday or even Saturday.

“It doesn’t look good,” a senior Administration official conceded.

Fighting not only for the crime bill but for what many Democrats see as his political life, Clinton cleared his calendar to devote full time to winning passage of the crime measure.

But as night fell, the White House had not won a single firm commitment to change votes from any of the 225 House members who voted against the bill. While Democratic vote counters said they have indications that several members will change their votes, on paper they still remained eight votes short of the 218 needed.

One argument that White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta and other officials were using with wayward Democrats was that the political calculus of the crime bill has taken on a life of its own since the leadership’s defeat last week and now threatens not only the bill but Democratic control of Congress next year.

With Clinton’s other major initiative--health care reform--also in trouble this year, the crime bill could be the only significant piece of legislation Congress approves between now and the November elections. As such, it could well become a test of the Democratic leadership’s ability to convince voters that it can overcome gridlock.

Last week’s political debacle “sent two messages to the voting public,” said political analyst Charles Cook.

“One is that Congress is deeply dysfunctional and the other is that the President is ineffective” and cannot deliver on his promises even when his own party controls both the House and the Senate, Cook said.

The “immediate political importance” of the crime bill easily “equals that of health care reform,” agreed one of the leadership’s chief vote counters, the House Deputy Majority Whip Bill Richardson (D-N.M.). “If we don’t win on this the second time around, we won’t have to bother legislating term limits.”