NEWS ANALYSIS : In Rougher Sea, President Sets a Cautious Course

If last year’s State of the Union Address reflected a man impatient to mark his place in history, this year’s speech by President Clinton bore the imprint of a battle-scarred political veteran whose eyes are on survival, not posterity.

Like a latter-day Lyndon B. Johnson, Clinton came into office determined to drive into law a herd of ambitious legislative proposals. With Tuesday night’s address, Clinton confronted the painful process of redefining his presidency, maintaining his relevance and reclaiming public support at a time when almost all his ideas and priorities will fall on barren ground in Congress.

As much in what the President omitted as in what he said, his speech underscored the extent to which last fall’s Republican landslide has forced him to circumscribe his ambitions. No longer can Clinton focus on enshrining his ideas into law. Instead, he has largely had to shift his attention to a defensive goal of halting the Republican drive to retrench the government and to wrest the White House from him in 1996.

Just a year ago, Clinton stood in the well of the House chamber and unfurled a legislative wish list that might have made even Johnson blush: education reform, defense conversion, a crime bill with a ban on assault weapons, welfare reform, campaign finance and lobbying reform, urban revitalization and--above all--health care reform that would finally fulfill the half-century liberal quest for guaranteed universal coverage.

Tuesday night, the President presented some specific initiatives, like new efforts to deter the hiring of illegal immigrants. But mostly his remarks inadvertently illuminated his diminished position. In place of last year’s detailed legislative blueprint, Clinton broadly lamented civic disengagement, defended accomplishments already on the books and offered some ideas, like raising the minimum wage and banning gifts from lobbyists to legislators, whose principal purpose may be to prompt rejection from congressional Republicans and thus draw contrasts that could boost Clinton’s reelection prospects.

In contrast to last year’s vision of a health care system reconstructed from the ground up, Clinton, in a tone that was almost plaintive, pleaded for Congress to work with him on “step by step” reform. And he emphasized the need to limit government--an idea that has always been part of Clinton’s agenda but usually subsumed in the kaleidoscope of proposals that he pointedly avoided Tuesday night.

Clinton was alternately colloquial and firm, insistent and ingratiating, but so encyclopedic that it seemed at points as if he were mounting some new form of filibuster. He seemed reluctant to leave the podium--as if he recognized that once he ceded the stage, the political initiative would return to the man sitting behind him, House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia.

“You can’t expect to put a lot of runs up on the legislative scoreboard with an opposition Congress,” said Alonzo Hamby, a historian at Ohio University who has written extensively on the modern Democratic Party. “But if you can convince the people they made a mistake by electing this opposition Congress . . , you can do yourself some good.”

Clinton’s immediate priority in the speech was a remarkable one for a President: reasserting himself as a meaningful force in the life of the capital and the country. To a stunning degree, the new Republican legislative majority has overshadowed and even relegated Clinton to the margins since November’s election.

Polls show that substantial majorities want the Republican Congress, not Clinton, to take the lead in solving the country’s problems. Gingrich has attracted the white-hot media and public attention typically reserved only for an incoming President.

“I’ve been joking this week that the State of the Union response would be a more accurate label for his speech,” said one House Republican leadership aide. “He clearly will be responding to our ideas and our agenda.”

In his effort to fight his way out of that corner, Clinton relied heavily on the themes that have undergirded every major speech he has delivered on the national stage. His lengthy analysis of government reform restated the principles of the “reinventing government” initiative that has burrowed into the bureaucracy under the direction of Vice President Al Gore. And his call for civic engagement returned, with greater depth, to the pleas for community that shaped his response to the Los Angeles riots in 1992 and have resurfaced intermittently in his rhetoric ever since.

But the center of the address was Clinton’s concept of a social contract based on reciprocal responsibility--what he termed, in a return to language common in his 1992 campaign, a “new covenant” between government and its citizens.

From the outset of his presidential campaign, the idea of linking opportunity and responsibility has been Clinton’s singular contribution to the domestic policy debate and the Democratic Party message. That balance shapes his proposals to reform welfare, which combine increased funds for training and education with requirements that recipients accept employment after two years on the rolls; to combat crime, which blends funds for prevention programs with new spending on prisons and police officers, and even his approach to the economy, which relies heavily on providing workers with the tools to expand their skills if they are willing to invest time in education and training.

In his speech, Clinton sought to contrast that balance with GOP initiatives that he insisted offer too few carrots and too many sticks on issues such as crime and welfare, and too narrow a concept of government’s obligation to help uplift its citizens.

In this argument, Republicans have strong winds at their backs: Last fall’s election results show that Americans remain enormously skeptical about government’s capacity to achieve any goal. But Clinton is not without assets in this debate: In a Times Poll released Monday, far more Americans supported reforming government so that it “works better” than “cutting back” on what the government does.

Still, for Clinton the question of whether Americans believe the ideas he expressed Tuesday night may be less important than whether they are convinced that he believes them. Or that he has the will and commitment to stand by them against opposition from the GOP or his own party.

For all his talk about personal responsibility, Clinton did not push his welfare reform initiative during his first two years, partly to avoid antagonizing liberals whose votes he coveted for health care reform. During an interminable legislative debate over crime, he did not forcefully confront House liberals who tilted the bill’s intricate balance away from prisons and police and more heavily toward social programs.

And he fatally compromised his image as a government reformer by proposing a massive increase in government authority over the health care system.

“The issue on that front is personal--people don’t believe him,” said one longtime ally who speaks regularly with the President. “This speech has to be a step on the path back. It’s not going to turn things around by itself. The challenge is what happens in the days ahead.”

While Clinton signaled support for some Republican priorities, like the line-item veto and restrictions on unfunded mandates on the states, White House aides said that the President will not hesitate to veto legislation that threatens what he considers his core achievements of the first two years--including the ban on assault weapons.

For other presidents faced with a Congress controlled by the opposition party--like Harry S. Truman and Gerald R. Ford--vetoes have proved a powerful way to define the alternatives and create a case for reelection, historian Hamby noted. And yet today, most Republican strategists insisted that they do not fear vetoes that sharpen the lines of division between the parties.

“(House Majority Leader) Dick Armey and Newt and others in our party live by an abiding faith that the more people understand the differences between our parties, the more we win,” the House leadership aide said.

But the larger fact remains that with the State of the Union Address now behind Clinton, the spotlight and the whip hand instantly shift back to a Republican congressional majority confident in its direction and remarkably unconcerned about either the President’s threats or flourishes.

“This is the first time in my memory for Republicans that a Democratic President is not the master of his own destiny,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “His ability to mobilize anything is dependent on us overreaching.”