Clinton Holds Out His Record as Election Issue : Politics: In risky move, he urges voters to choose between his policies and what the GOP is proposing.

President Clinton challenged voters Friday to turn the November midterm elections into a referendum on what course the nation should pursue over the next two years--a high-risk strategy that flies directly against the desires of many of his party’s candidates.

“We have to now resolve to give the American people a choice,” Clinton said at a news conference. Americans, he said, must decide whether they want the sort of changes he has proposed but that Republicans have strived to kill in Congress or whether they prefer the very different kind of policies embodied in the GOP’s much-debated “Contract with America.”

Clinton said he understands that many voters are distressed at what the government has achieved so far but warned against electing candidates--Republicans, in his view--who would make things worse.

“The voters are going to decide whether this is the right direction and I hope they decide that it is,” he said. “My only concern is that the American people not go out and vote against what they are for and vote for what they are against,” he said.

“We are getting our economic house in order. Jobs are being created at home. We are moving in the right direction,” he added. “It’s only a beginning, and more could have been done. But too many times an idea for creating jobs, reforming government, educating students or expanding income, fighting crime or cleaning up the environment or reforming the political system was met by someone trying to stop it, slow it, kill it or just talk it to death.”

Clinton, according to officials close to him, is convinced of two things: first, that despite setbacks on issues from health care to political reform, the record of his first 20 months in office is better than most Americans appear to believe and, second, that if he can just get out of Washington and make that case, the voters will agree.

“The record is a good one and there is ample evidence that, if people know the record, they respond to it,” he said.

Many Democratic campaign strategists doubt that, however, and--while they resist criticizing the White House in public--many are chilled by the idea of an unpopular President urging Americans to vote up or down on the future of his policies. Across the country, Democratic candidates have been distancing themselves from Clinton, trying to focus the voters on local concerns, not broad, national themes.

In private meetings, many strategists have urged that the White House avoid precisely the sort of argument Clinton made Friday. Clinton plans to make his argument repeatedly in the month remaining before the election. White House officials already have scheduled appearances for him in more than a dozen states over the next two weeks with an even more hectic schedule planned for the final days before voters go to the polls Nov. 8.

On other topics, Clinton delivered a strong defense of Henry G. Cisneros, the secretary of housing and urban development, and also said that he has not yet figured out what strategy to follow in reopening the health care debate next year.

The Justice Department has been investigating whether, at the time he was nominated, Cisneros had fully disclosed to the FBI that he had been making monthly payments to a woman with whom he had had an affair.

White House officials have said that if the FBI concludes he was not fully forthcoming, Cisneros will resign. But Clinton indicated that he believes Cisneros will be exonerated.

“We know what the facts were at the time” he was named, Clinton said. “He is doing the job that I hired him to do for the American people and, as long as he is doing that job at a high level, I think he ought to be permitted to continue to do it.”

On the midterm elections, the essence of Clinton’s argument is that what the Republicans are offering is a return to Reaganism and he repeatedly accused the GOP of seeking to take the country “back to the past.”

Many Democratic strategists agree that many parts of the Republican “contract” are vulnerable to attack. While polls show Clinton is unpopular, voters have not, in hindsight, warmed to the policies of former presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the Democratic pollsters have said.

Already many Democratic candidates have begun attacking the GOP contract, arguing that the large tax cuts it urges would go primarily to wealthy Americans, that its calls for tax cuts and defense-spending increases would lead to huge deficit increases and that its advocacy of a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution without specifying how to pay for it would require huge cuts in Medicare, Social Security or other popular benefits programs.

What makes many Democrats nervous is not the idea of attacking the Republican platform, but of trying to defend Clinton’s policies. The White House has directed the Democratic National Committee to offer money to state parties to air a national television advertisement touting Clinton’s record but many in the party are skeptical that candidates will want to use it.

White House officials, on the other hand, have argued that Democrats are deluding themselves if they believe they can completely separate their fate from Clinton’s. If the President can boost his approval ratings by even a few points, that could be enough to help some endangered Democrats over the top, they believe.

Republicans, for their part, already have been doing their best to make Clinton the issue in races across the nation. Many of them have said they welcome the chance to run the sort of referendum Clinton says he wants.

“Republicans should welcome the chance to make this election a referendum on the Reagan years versus the Clinton years,” said Jack Kemp, the former secretary of housing and urban development, who may run for President in 1996.

What Clinton calls obstructionism, many Republicans have argued, is no vice. “Saying ‘no’ to bad laws, bad programs and bad government is a good, positive thing,” said Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), another possible 1996 presidential hopeful. “I’m not going to apologize for being an instrument of the public will.”

Clinton faces two huge problems in making his case to voters. First, as even White House polls show, the majority of voters simply do not believe that he has accomplished as much as he claims.

On the deficit, for example, the budget legislation Clinton pushed through Congress a year ago has, in fact, resulted in a large reduction in the government’s red ink--an accomplishment that Clinton trumpets in nearly every speech he makes. But poll after poll has shown that most voters flatly do not believe the deficit has been cut.

A second problem, as Clinton acknowledged, is that--despite nearly two years of solid economic expansion in most of the country--the majority of Americans have not seen their own circumstances improve. This is particularly true of lower-income Americans on whom Democrats rely for support.

The Census Bureau reported earlier this week that in 1993, the nation’s median income fell, average wages declined after adjustment for inflation and--while the richest 20% of Americans continued to gain ground--those on the lower half of the income scale were worse off.

Clinton made those trends the centerpiece of his campaign--indicting the 1980s as a decade in which the rich grew richer while the poor and the middle class suffered. Now, he said, while he believes his policies eventually will reverse those trends, he does not know if the results will show up before he must face the voters again in 1996.

“These trends have been developing for nearly 20 years,” Clinton said. “I don’t think anyone thought I could turn them around in a year or that I alone could turn them around.”

Over time, he said, the country must improve the education and skills of its workers, increase the percentage of high-wage jobs in the economy and “bring free enterprise to the inner cities and the isolated rural areas.”

“I don’t know” if that can be done in the two years remaining in his term, Clinton said. But, he added, “we have to stay on this course. If we change course in this midterm election . . . we’ll be going in the wrong direction.”