President’s Aides Seek New Strategies for Next 2 Years

For two years, President Clinton asked voters to judge him by his ability to move legislation through Congress. His pollster, Stanley B. Greenberg, even developed a hypothesis that the ability to master Congress might be for presidents in the post-Cold War period the kind of litmus test of strength that mastering the Soviets was for presidents from Harry S. Truman through Ronald Reagan.

Now, with Clinton’s legislative record swathed in bandages and Republicans poised to gain a substantial number of seats in the House and Senate on Tuesday, his aides concede that they must either develop a new definition of success or accept a verdict of failure.

For several weeks, meeting as much as possible out of the public eye, groups of top Clinton advisers have been debating the themes and initiatives they should focus on in the next two years. While the President and his aides are not expected to make many decisions before Thanksgiving, the major options are already clear.

As has been true throughout his term, Clinton faces a choice--and a division among his advisers--between an “inside” path and an “outside” one.

While he ran for the presidency as an outsider--repeatedly reminding voters that he had been a governor, not part of the “Washington crowd”--Clinton in office deliberately followed an insider strategy. The President and his aides, many of whom had served apprenticeships on Capitol Hill, were fixed on avoiding the fate of the previous Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, who badly alienated congressional Democrats and suffered accordingly.

Determined to get legislation passed, Clinton tied himself to his party’s congressional leadership, tailoring his proposals ahead of time to avoid conflicts with committee and subcommittee chairmen, often at the expense of presenting clear, uncomplicated proposals to the public at large.

The strategy succeeded for the President’s budget plan last year--a crucial piece of legislation that all Republican members of Congress announced long in advance they would oppose. But this year, tying Clinton’s fortunes to congressional Democrats became a major problem, yielding neither public esteem nor success on the President’s major initiative: health care.

Now, about to face a new Congress almost certain to be far more hostile to his proposals, at least some Clinton advisers believe the President has an opportunity to stop worrying about passing legislation and, instead, to look for bold, high-profile initiatives that can give Americans a clear idea of what he is willing to fight for. That way, they argue, he might recapture the mantle of “change” that slipped from his shoulders during months of legislative haggling.

Others, however, argue that despite widespread cynicism about government, the public still expects Congress and the President to get things done. The President must at least try to find ways of working within the system in Congress and pass legislation--even if the Republicans gain control, this group contends.

“You have to begin with the premise that a President and a Congress have to work together,” White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta said in a recent interview. “I’ve never seen an issue that can’t be worked through if there’s good faith” on both sides, he said.

Clinton aides point to next month’s scheduled vote on the world trade agreement, followed by tests early next year on welfare and political reform, as the areas that will indicate what the legislative climate will be.

Republicans have promised that if they gain power in Congress, they will pass reforms of lobbying laws, campaign finances and the welfare system--all areas in which Clinton has made proposals. In theory, the two parties could agree on compromises that would allow reform legislation to pass.

In practice, however, many White House aides say they doubt that the Republicans really will allow anything to pass, fearing Clinton will be able to claim credit for it.

Even Panetta, after making the case for bipartisan accommodation, said he was “skeptical” that Republican leaders--particularly Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)--would actually agree to work with Clinton. “Once you get a taste of this sort of confrontation, sometimes it goes to your head,” he said, referring to the anti-Clinton campaign tactics that Gingrich has pushed.

If the Republicans say: “ ‘To hell with you, we’re not going to work with you,’ then clearly we’re looking at confrontational politics,” Panetta said.

In that case, aides say, Clinton faces two major alternative strategies.

One would be to imitate Truman, who proposed policies he favored, watched while Republican legislators killed them, and then focused his 1948 presidential campaign into an attack on the “do-nothing Congress.” Already, Clinton advisers have begun honing their lines for such a campaign.

“If the President is sincerely working for change, and they’re blocking it, that will move the public,” said George Stephanopoulos, senior adviser to the President. “If they gain a lot of seats, the Republicans are going to have to take responsibility for governing.”

The downside of that strategy, aides concede, is that it would only work if the Republicans truly capture control of both houses. A Republican gain large enough to give the party de facto control would still leave Democrats nominally in charge, making a strategy of running against Congress futile for a Democratic President. Even if the Republicans do win control, the Truman strategy has been hard to duplicate--George Bush, for example, tried it with little success.

The other alternative would be for Clinton to attempt to minimize the Republicans’ advantage as much as possible by declining to engage Congress--concentrating instead on areas in which he can act alone.

“As President, he has many more stages on which to operate” than just the legislative one, Greenberg said. Other aides, amplifying that point, argue that Clinton may discover, as most of his predecessors have, that a combination of high-profile foreign policy actions and executive branch actions that do not require new legislation can yield more benefits than endless wrangling with congressional committees.

Clinton advisers say the choice between those two paths depends, in part, on what one believes will best motivate the electorate’s all-important swing voters.

Despite the roller-coaster nature of Clinton’s approval ratings in the past 20 months, neither his core support nor his core opposition has changed much, notes Republican pollster William McInturff. Clinton has remained popular with those who voted for him in 1992--although many are disappointed that he has not been able to accomplish more. And from Day One he has been reviled by the vast majority of those who voted for Bush.

The ups and downs have come almost exclusively from the vacillating perceptions of the swing voters--the mostly white, primarily male, predominantly lower-income voters who sided in large numbers with independent presidential candidate Ross Perot in 1992.

One school of thought is that those voters truly are motivated by anger at the political system itself and that they deeply want to see the system reformed. If that is the case, then a strong presidential effort for measures like campaign-finance reform and lobbying reform might be the best way to win over the people whose support Clinton will need to win reelection in 1996. That would require pushing new legislation.

A second school of thought is that while the swing voters may say they are angry at the political system or at the federal deficit or, generally, at the “mess in Washington,” the real cause of their upset is 20 years of stagnant living standards.

Although swing voters are found at every level of income and education, polls indicate that the bulk of those who have veered in the past two years from tolerance of Clinton to anger at him are lower-income men without a college degree--precisely the people who have suffered the greatest relative decline in living standards during the past two decades of slow income growth. The best way of cementing their allegiance is, simply, to raise wages, some Clinton aides argue.

If that is the case, then new legislation--with the possible exception of job-training measures--will do little to win over these voters. But the good news for Clinton, advocates of this point of view argue, is that the economic policies already in place, combined with the natural workings of the economic recovery, should bring about rising wages during the next few years.

Indeed, some statistical measures suggest that wage increases already have begun. So while the improving economy has not benefited Clinton in this election year, it may do so during the next two years as the fruits of the recovery become more real to people. In the meantime, some advisers argue, the best strategy for Clinton may be to avoid debilitating legislative fights while taking other actions that make him seem more “presidential.”

Clinton aides already have begun taking steps in that direction. The White House has started planning for a heavy foreign travel schedule in 1995, including a likely trip to South Africa--the first ever by a U.S. President--plus a summit in Moscow with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, a 50th anniversary celebration of the end of World War II in Europe in the spring and economic summits in both Europe and Asia.

Officials also are hopeful that U.S. efforts to broker a deal between Israel and Syria may bear fruit next year, allowing Clinton to preside over a third Mideast peace ceremony.

On the domestic side, Clinton can push his “reinventing government” efforts--looking for ways to dramatize the idea that he is reducing the size of the government. He can also take administrative actions to remind Americans of legislation that Congress did pass but that polls indicate most people know nothing about.

“Part of what you want to do is make sure you take the bills” that did pass in the last two years and “turn good laws into good policies that make a change in people’s lives,” Stephanopoulos said. As the Family Leave Act, the expanded earned-income tax credit, the national service plan and student-loan reform begin to take effect, Stephanopoulos said, they will become “more real” to people and be of much greater political benefit.

Clinton addressed that issue in a recent interview with the Black Entertainment Television cable channel.

“Most Americans do not know, unless they’ve been personally affected by the college loan program, the family leave program, the immunization program,” he said. “We just have to work harder to get those messages out. And next year, I’m going to devote an enormous amount of time to doing it.”