NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Will Have Little Chance to Savor Victory : Politics: President has been analyzing past mistakes as he faces a host of continuing struggles.

While Thursday’s climactic vote on the crime bill gave President Clinton another comeback victory, the win was so narrow and bitter that it leaves open the question of whether he gained any significant political leverage for the relentless series of other problems he now faces.

Lately, he has taken to comparing himself to Ahab, locked in a death embrace with Moby Dick in the form of an unruly Congress. The beast keeps dragging him under, Clinton has complained to associates, and he can barely catch his breath before another dive carries him down again.

He and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, a top adviser and leader of the campaign for health care reform, will get a brief respite now with the Senate leaving town for the Labor Day recess. The Clintons are expected to leave Washington shortly for a two-week vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

Both Clintons have spent many hours during the past several weeks reviewing with aides and friends the first 20 months of his presidency, wondering aloud what corrections to make and how to make the most of his remaining time in office.

But the presidency allows little time for introspection. Having surmounted the crime bill, Clinton still faces the debilitating Whitewater investigation, a full-blown Cuban refugee crisis, the possibility of military action in Haiti, the continuing tragedy in the Balkans and the paralyzed health care debate.

The Clintons acknowledge privately that the President asked too much too soon from Congress and the nation. He follows each victory with a fresh fight, with no time for “victory laps” of self-congratulation. And he realizes that his efforts to “reinvent government,” no matter how successful, will be met by a public grown cynical about the government’s ability to do anything well.

The President complains that he gets no credit for what he considers his signal achievements--a resurgent economy, substantial reduction in the federal budget deficit, conclusion of two major trade agreements, a family leave bill, handgun-control legislation and financial aid to support democracy in Russia.

The Clintons acknowledge a significant shortcoming spotted early in the Administration by friend and foe alike: too many young aides and inexperienced people serving in senior White House positions. They have been bringing in more experienced people, including Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, who plans a further shake-up that presumably will bring in more seasoned hands.

Clinton has already recruited former California congressman Tony Coelho as his top political adviser and longtime Illinois lawmaker and federal judge Abner J. Mikva as White House counsel. Both are what younger aides refer to as “grown-ups.”

While the President and First Lady freely admit numerous errors in judgment and in tactics, they deeply believe that they have been unjustly vilified. They complain privately that powerful forces--from congressional Republicans and the so-called religious right to talk-radio hosts--are intent on destroying them personally. They describe the experience to friends as “a surreal nightmare.”

The Republicans, they believe, turned on them with a vengeance after being denied the three major issues they had thrived on for years: communism, jobs and crime.

“After communism collapsed, the economy rebounded and Clinton took the law-and-order issue away from them, the Republicans felt they had no choice but to go after the President personally,” said a senior Administration official.

Whatever the reason for the attacks, Clinton and his senior aides were unprepared for the torrent of criticism. It has been difficult for Clinton to rise above what he has called the “static” of the media and present to the American people what he considers an accurate portrait of himself and his presidency.

During the next several weeks, aides say, Clinton will attempt to define for himself and for the country what he stands for. Although he rejects criticism that he has not paid enough attention to foreign affairs, he realizes his failure to spell out his foreign policy goals has hurt him at home and abroad. Aides say he can be expected to address that in major foreign policy speeches in September.

He also will attempt to distance himself from the Democratic leadership in Congress, which he believes deserted him in several of the most critical moments in his presidency--particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement and the ban on assault weapons in the crime bill.

The President and First Lady both were irritated that House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) and House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), in proposing a concession to get the crime bill passed, urged the Administration to drop one of the measure’s most popular provisions--the ban on assault weapons.

Clinton felt that Foley and Gephardt “took a walk” when they should have been pressing for the gun-control measure. It was Clinton and two of his aides, not Foley and Gephardt, who worked to get approval of the bill by a Senate-House conference committee.

Clinton has repeatedly noted to associates that he was not elected prime minister--the leader of his party and the head of government--but President--the head of state and the leader of the nation.

Aides say he is looking for ways to be more presidential, to rise above partisan squabbles and to divorce his fate from that of specific pieces of legislation. In part, this is a defense against the likelihood that Congress will not act on his health care plan this year.

Clinton now says he wants his presidency to be about ideas, not bills. He has expressed those “new Democrat” ideas--making government work for people, renewing a sense of community, fostering personal responsibility--in countless speeches as candidate and President. But he despairs that he has not been heard above the din.

And yet, even as he talks about rising above the daily grind of governing, Clinton cannot escape himself--a person willing to talk endlessly and act only reluctantly, a policy addict who can get submerged in details, and a politician who can charm virtually anyone but is unable, finally, to convince a nation of his trustworthiness.

Clinton is intent on entering the fall political season by speaking less and saying more, picking “moments” that define his presidency, an aide said. He considers his speech on civil rights, made in Memphis, Tenn., last November, to be one of the high points of his tenure.

That speech to a group of Baptist ministers--at the scene of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last sermon--was a heartfelt appeal to end the slaughter in American cities that was not about legislation, not about Bill Clinton but about a concern that many Americans feel about the direction of the country.

The President can be expected to mount that pulpit again in coming months, aides say.

Another problem weighing heavily on Clinton is the continuing character issue revolving around the Whitewater controversy and the plethora of conspiracy theories it has spawned, as well as Paula Corbin Jones’ civil suit alleging sexual misconduct. The President is saddled with two sets of very expensive defense lawyers--one for Whitewater and the other for the sexual-harassment suit.

The White House is convinced that the President and the First Lady lost four precious months at the beginning of the year as Congress and the media were transfixed by Whitewater questions.

Those lost months took the steam out of the health care reform drive, the President and his advisers believe, a delay that has all but certainly cost them action this year on the President’s central policy initiative.

Moreover, the Republicans, having lost the crime bill fight, are likely to pull out all stops to defeat any health care reform bill acceptable to the Clintons.

In fact, the Clintons believed that Senate Republican leaders tried to use the crime bill as a weapon against the health care legislation, offering, in effect, to let the crime bill pass if Clinton would abandon health care reform.

Shortly before the Senate passed the crime bill, a senior White House aide said, “People here feel that Republicans want to use the crime bill to kill health care reform. They are committed to assuring that the President doesn’t have a success.”