Clinton, GOP Set Cooperative Tone : Politics: President, Republican leaders of Congress meet at White House, vow to work for common good. But upbeat words can't dissolve deep disagreements.

By DOYLE McMANUS

Jan. 6, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON —

In an earnest display of good intentions, President Clinton and the new Republican leaders of Congress promised Thursday to try to work together for the common good--and then reaffirmed their deep disagreements over political reform, tax cuts and other issues.

In his first formal meeting with the newly installed congressional leadership, Clinton said that he is ready to cooperate with House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) whenever he can.

“I think the people are sick, literally sick, of seeing all this partisan infighting up here,” Clinton said. “My job is not to stand in the way and be an obstructionist force. . . . My job is to work with them to try to help build this country.”

The normally combative Gingrich responded amicably, saying that he and Clinton share “a very real willingness to try to find a way to try to work together.”

When a reporter asked if he had clashed with Clinton on any issues, Gingrich upbraided the questioner for “cynicism.”

“It was a very, very positive meeting,” he said.

After months of rhetorical battles in which Clinton and Gingrich roundly denounced each others’ views as inimical to American life, the sudden announcement that they would seek common ground seemed somewhat unreal.

Indeed, within minutes of their optimistic professions of bipartisanship, other Democrats and Republicans returned to familiar debates about balancing the federal budget and designing tax cuts for the middle class.

But Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento), who attended the White House meeting as a member of the House Democratic leadership, explained the sudden outbreak of conciliation in straightforward political terms--as a common fear of being blamed for another year of gridlock.

“There’s a seething electorate out there with a short tether on its politicians that’s driving everybody,” he said. “If we can get something done by working together, there will be plenty of credit to go around. And if we fail, everybody’s vulnerable to criticism.”

Gingrich and Dole may command a majority in Congress, another Democrat said, but “Clinton has a veto”--meaning that the Republicans may need the President’s cooperation to pass much of the legislation they want.

At the hourlong meeting in the White House Cabinet Room, Clinton told the Republican and Democratic congressional leaders that he wants to meet with them regularly from now on to see whether bipartisan efforts really are possible.

Clinton applauded the House for its votes Wednesday on a series of internal reforms proposed by Gingrich, including a rule requiring Congress to submit to the laws it passes for the rest of the country.

Afterward, each side said that the other made concessions--but in an inauspicious note, they disagreed on how far those concessions went.

Clinton said Gingrich agreed to avert a “bidding war” on tax cuts by making sure that any GOP proposal for a middle-class tax cut is balanced by equivalent spending cuts. Clinton has proposed a $60-billion tax cut that he says would not increase the federal budget deficit. White House officials said they believe that the Republicans will find it politically impossible to cut enough additional spending to allow the larger tax cuts they have proposed.

But House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) said that was not a concession, adding that Republicans already intended to make deep spending cuts before considering any tax reductions.

For his part, Gingrich told reporters that the President had offered “not to engage in an aggressive campaign” against the balanced-budget amendment that Republicans seek.

But a White House aide said that Clinton had merely observed that the amendment is likely to pass in both houses of Congress and that he might not be able to stop it.

And later in the day, Alice Rivlin, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, formally repeated the Administration’s opposition to the amendment. “We do not believe fiscal policy belongs in the Constitution,” Rivlin told the Senate Judiciary Committee in the year’s first hearing on the proposal.

She said that federal deficit spending during recessions helps the economy and that a balanced-budget amendment could eliminate that stabilizing effect. “Enforcing balance every year would lead to wider swings in the business cycle,” she said.

Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich denounced the Republicans’ economic plans as “a rerun, on a larger screen, of 12 years of Republican government--12 years of stagnation or decline for most working Americans.” Reich said his statement, in a speech to the National Press Club, had been cleared with the White House.

On the other side of the aisle, Gingrich--returning to the fiery rhetoric of the election campaign--dismissed the Clinton Treasury Department’s estimates of what a big tax cut would do to increase the deficit, saying that they were produced by “socialist-mentality bureaucrats who have been consistently wrong.”

As the arguments flared, the Republican National Committee unveiled a new television commercial boasting that the GOP majority in Congress had begun enacting its midterm election campaign promises in “the first step toward smaller government, lower taxes and more freedom.”

“We’ll see how long we can keep some bipartisan spirit going,” a White House aide said warily. “In terms of cooperation, it depends on what direction they (the Republicans) go.”

At a meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee, Gingrich said he is confident that the GOP can propose billions of dollars in larger tax cuts without increasing the deficit. “We should pay as we go and, if anything, pay more than we need,” he said.

Rep. Sam Gibbons (D-Fla.), who chaired the committee until the Nov. 8 elections shifted the Democrats into the minority, cited a Treasury Department estimate that the tax cuts contained in the GOP’s “contract with America” would cost the federal government $712 billion in revenue over 10 years.

Complaining that the Republicans have yet to spell out the spending cuts they would make to offset that loss without ballooning the deficit, Gibbons charged that the GOP lawmakers are about to “perpetrate another cruel hoax on the people” by proposing tax cuts for which they cannot pay.

Gingrich responded with his denunciation of the Treasury Department economists, who he said had been wrong before and could be wrong again.

But in keeping with the tone of his session with Clinton, Gingrich sought to keep the meeting cordial, even when Rep. Pete Stark (D-Hayward) characterized one of the GOP tax cut proposals as “taking from the poor to give to the rich.”

If Democrats were temporarily exempt from Gingrich’s fire on Thursday, reporters and Washington lobbyists were not.

“Let me say bluntly that if we allow the lobbyists and the press culture of this city and the bureaucrats to guarantee that we fight, then we will get nothing done,” he said. “It is a sick, out-of-touch culture (in Washington) and we have to reach beyond it and get in touch with the American people.”

After a marathon opening day session in which it voted to slash congressional staffs and make income tax increases more difficult to enact by requiring their passage by a 60% majority, the House took the day off Thursday.

The Senate, however, struggled throughout the day with a bill, passed by the House early Thursday as it ended its first day of business, that would apply private sector workplace laws to Congress itself. The so-called “congressional accountability” bill was passed overwhelmingly by the House. The Senate debate is scheduled to continue today.

Earlier, in their first roll-call vote of the new session, the senators also killed a proposal by maverick Democrats to make it easier to end filibusters.

Republicans used the filibuster to great effect when they were in the minority. But they teamed up with Democrats, who assailed the GOP delaying tactics but who are rediscovering the virtues of the filibuster this year, to defeat the proposal by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), 76 to 19.

Times staff writers Michael Ross and Paul Richter also contributed to this story.