Aides Say State of Union Will ‘Reintroduce’ Clinton

When President Clinton delivers his State of the Union Address before the new Republican Congress on Tuesday, he faces a daunting and perhaps impossible mission: to convince millions of Americans that he is not the man they think he is.

After two years in office, White House aides say, Clinton wants to “reintroduce” himself to voters--to show them he is still the centrist “new Democrat” they supported in 1992, not the tax-and-spend liberal they rejected in 1994.

“We have an opportunity here to restart a conversation with the American people . . . about what this President wants to do,” White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said. “We think it’s important to do that.”

It might seem strange for a President who has been speaking in public almost every day for years to find it necessary to reintroduce himself. But Clinton and his aides believe that a major factor behind his party’s sweeping defeat in November’s congressional election was their inability to effectively communicate Clinton’s vision and values.

“It’s easy to be demonized when you’re a long way from where people live,” Clinton fretted in a speech last month. The middle-class voters who put the Republicans in power “are the very people I’ve been up here killing myself for two years trying to help,” he said.

The problem, aides say, is that too many voters still conclude that Clinton is an old-style liberal, and too few for the Administration’s liking are willing to give him credit for the $255 billion in spending cuts he has made--not to mention (as the White House frequently does) a sustained economic recovery and 5.6 million new jobs.

Polls confirm their diagnosis: A Washington Post/ABC News poll earlier this month found that 48% of the public consider Clinton a “tax-and-spend” Democrat and 45% see him as a budget-cutting “new Democrat.”

The President’s own pollster, Stanley B. Greenberg, found that many voters pointed to Clinton’s signature initiative last year, his proposed national health care plan, as an example of the kind of intrusive, big-government program they don’t like.

Accordingly, aides say, the core of Clinton’s third State of the Union speech will be a review of what he considers his unnoticed achievements, along with a renewed pledge to cut the federal budget deficit--and perhaps a list of new spending cuts to come.

At the same time, the President will reaffirm his belief that Americans want a federal government that is activist as well as limited. “We need a new form of government that is smaller, less bureaucratic, more creative . . . but one that is an effective partner, not a disabled or a mean (government) on the sideline,” he said in Los Angeles last week.

Dusting off a slogan from the glory days of his presidential campaign, Clinton has returned to calling his policy the “New Covenant.” But for a more current label--and in a bow to the program of his adversary, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)--he also describes it as “my own contract with America.”

The “New Covenant” is aimed squarely at the disenchanted middle class. “It says that people who act responsibly should be rewarded,” Clinton said at a bill-signing ceremony last week. “They deserve a government that will protect them and stand by them.”

But Clinton faces an uphill struggle in changing the public’s impression of him. Tuesday evening’s speech will be only a start, at best.

“It isn’t easy to change the public’s view of a sitting President,” said political scientist William Schneider, a contributing editor to The Times’ Opinion section and a CNN political analyst.

“After two years, people have a pretty good idea of what they think of Clinton. Most Americans think he’s a good man who wants the right things. But they have also concluded that he’s weak and ineffectual . . . and it’s hard to turn that around.

“You can’t do it with rhetoric,” he added. “It can only be done with bold actions.”

There is at least one precedent for what Clinton hopes to do, he noted: “Harry Truman did it in 1947 and 1948,” after a similarly disastrous loss in both houses of Congress.

But Truman won his image as a strong leader by taking the initiative in Cold War confrontations with the Soviet Union, threatening to seize U.S. railroads during a 1948 strike and challenging a passive Republican Congress to act on his domestic agenda. “He had opportunities that Clinton doesn’t have,” Schneider said.

In an attempt to show some of the toughness that was Truman’s hallmark, Clinton plans to warn the Republican congressional majority that he will stand firm against the repeal of initiatives that he considers his “signature” programs, aides say.

He will reach out to Republicans on some issues, but “there will be some ‘Hell, no’s’ too,” an aide involved in drafting the speech said.

Clinton will demand that Congress do nothing that “explodes” the deficit, guts his job-training programs, reverses his promise to put 100,000 new police officers on the street or tears down his national service program, aides say.

But by Sunday, it had not been decided whether Clinton would actually threaten any vetoes; the fear was that such a threat would remind the public of his ultimately empty threat in last year’s State of the Union message to veto any health care legislation that did not deliver comprehensive and permanent benefits to all Americans.

The White House was unable to get any health care reform bill through Congress.

The President will also try to draw a clear contrast between his vision of government as a “partner” with citizens and the Republican position that most government is at best a necessary evil, aides say.

Some of Clinton’s advisers have urged him to adopt a confrontational, partisan and populist tone--to paint the GOP, as one adviser put it, as “those who buy and sell yachts and racehorses and Picassos, the very wealthy and the very privileged.”

But Clinton has usually shied away from that kind of bare-knuckled language, and other aides said he was unlikely to use it in Tuesday’s address.

Instead, the President’s appeal will be aimed squarely at what he calls the “forgotten middle class.”

He will promote his “middle-class bill of rights,” unveiled last month, which includes a tax cut for most families with young children and tax incentives for post-secondary education, individual retirement accounts and job retraining.

“It’s about more than a tax cut, although cutting taxes is part of it,” Clinton said in Galesburg, Ill., in a speech that aides said foreshadowed the State of the Union Address. “What those of us in the position to do so ought to be doing is expanding opportunity, but only for those who will exercise the personal responsibility to make the most of those opportunities.”

White House officials said several specific proposals were under consideration for the speech, including an increase in the minimum wage from $4.25 per hour to $5 or more, a plan to privatize many federal government activities and suggestions for deep budget cuts at several federal agencies. But as of Sunday, none had made it into Clinton’s draft of the speech, a senior official said.

“Those decisions won’t be made before Monday or Tuesday,” he said. “The first thing they’ve been concentrating on is making sure the basic message about the President’s vision is right. . . . Whether there’s a minimum-wage proposal may depend on how that fits or belongs in the speech or not.”

McCurry said the speech would be “more vision than laundry list,” unlike most State of the Union addresses, which tend to be unmemorable catalogues of presidential initiatives.

Still, the speech will devote some time to at least one such laundry list. Last week, the White House issued a 37-page compendium of Clinton’s campaign promises, reporting that he has kept precisely 76% of them “substantially or partially”--from easing voter-registration requirements to signing the Brady handgun-control law.

White House officials acknowledge that they have done a poor job of selling Clinton’s accomplishments, and they describe the booklet as a way to begin making up lost ground.

But they have work to do even among their own supporters. Last week, Clinton met with a group of Democratic senators and mentioned that he was planning a ceremony to celebrate the signing of the Retirement Protection Act, which requires large firms with underfunded pension plans to increase their funding levels, making the plans more secure.

Several of the senators looked surprised. They had voted for the bill, one official said, but even they didn’t realize it had passed.