Clinton Threatens to Veto 7 Measures in GOP ‘Contract’ : Legislation: ‘Extremism’ of several House bills must be tempered, President tells editors in speech. If not, he vows to wield weapon he has thus far never employed.

President Clinton, assailing the “ideological extremism” of much of the Republican legislative agenda, threatened Friday to veto seven Republican-sponsored measures passed by the House.

Breaking three months of relative silence as the GOP-controlled House marched through its “contract with America,” Clinton issued ritualistic promises of cooperation but stressed the areas in which he intends confrontation.

“I do not want a pile of vetoes,” Clinton said--urging Republicans to work with him on areas such as welfare reform and reducing the size of government. But he quickly followed up with the seven explicit veto threats.

The threats were a marked departure from the accommodating rhetoric that has predominated in White House statements recently and were all the more remarkable given that in his 27 months in office, Clinton has not yet exercised his power to kill a single piece of legislation--a modern record for abstention.

Speaking to a convention here of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Clinton also said that he does not think the United States should apologize to Japan for the atomic bombing that ended World War II. Asked by Josette Shiner, managing editor of the conservative Washington Times, whether the 50th anniversary of the end of the war marked a good time for such an apology, and also whether he thought President Harry S. Truman was right to have dropped the bomb, Clinton gave a display of uncharacteristic rhetorical discipline.

“No,” Clinton answered the first question. “And, based on the facts he had before him, yes,” he said in reply to the second. The remarks drew applause from the audience of editors.

Clinton’s speech, with its balancing of veto threats on some issues and conciliatory rhetoric on others, illustrates the strategy that his advisers hope he will follow in the next several months--positioning himself as a national leader, above the partisan fray, who can advocate “good change” while blocking changes that go “too far.”

Throughout the country’s history, Clinton said, his most successful predecessors have responded to reform movements and have “incorporated what was good, smoothed out what was rough and discarded what would hurt.”

Now, “in the first 100 days it fell to the House of Representatives to propose,” Clinton said, describing how he sees the presidential role. “In the next 100 days and beyond, the President has to lead the quiet, reasoned forces of both parties in both houses to sift through the rhetoric and decide what is really best for America. In making these decisions, it is absolutely vital that we keep alive the spirit and the momentum of change. But the momentum must not carry us so far that we betray our legacy of compassion, decency and common sense.

“This is no time for ideological extremism,” he added. “Good-faith compromising, negotiating our differences, actually listening to one another for a change; these are the currency of a healthy democracy.”

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Despite those calls for compromise, however, Clinton’s veto threats covered a major part of the legislation passed by the House so far, as well as other measures that Republicans have advocated but not yet considered.

Clinton said that he would veto efforts to weaken environmental protections, to limit government’s ability to regulate uses of privately owned land, to repeal his plan to have the federal government give local government money to hire new police officers, to repeal last year’s ban on 19 types of assault weapons and to sharply limit American participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations.

He also said that he would veto the House-passed legal reform bill, which contains a provision requiring the loser in a civil lawsuit to pay the costs of litigation, and the House-passed bill to limit government regulations, saying that it would “let a bunch of lawyers tie up regulation for years.”

And while he did not explicitly threaten to veto the $189-billion tax-cut package passed by the House this week, he left little doubt that he would not accept it in its current form.

“This . . . tax cut is a fantasy. It’s too much. It’s not going to happen. We can’t afford it,” the President said.

He said that the programs Republicans have chosen to cut to compensate for their tax reductions would wreak a “horrible injustice on the most vulnerable people in our society.”

Clinton’s no-veto record so far is highly unusual. Every President since Herbert Hoover has vetoed at least some bills in his first two years in office--even those, such as Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter, whose parties controlled both houses of Congress. Clinton’s predecessor, George Bush, used vetoes as a major part of his strategy for dealing with congressional Democrats--killing 41 measures.

Aides described Clinton’s combative, 45-minute address as the opening salvo of 100 days of counteroffensives against the new Republican ascendancy. It was clearly timed to compete with the prime-time television speech Friday night of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

The speech was significantly more focused than many of Clinton’s recent addresses, including the 81-minute State of the Union speech. It marked the start of a weekend of events designed to seize the momentum in a debate that so far has been largely dominated by Republicans in Congress. Today, for example, Clinton plans to attend events in Los Angeles designed to highlight his support for education programs.

While carefully pointing out a need for bipartisanship and some areas of agreement with the Republicans--the line-item veto, legislation to limit so-called unfunded mandates and a measure applying civil rights and worker safety laws to congressional employees, for example--he employed some of the most heated language of his presidency to decry GOP policies and priorities.

He described many of the measures contained in the 10-count GOP “contract” as extreme and said that their enactment would eviscerate the nation’s “legacy of decency, compassion and common sense.”

And mounting a class-based attack on the Republican economic plan, he accused the opposition of gutting programs that serve poor women and helpless children to finance tax relief for the wealthiest Americans.

“We’ve got to choose--a tax cut for the wealthy or for the middle class,” Clinton said.

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Clinton said that he sought to reject the partisanship of both sides and craft a “dynamic center” that mines the best ideas of both parties to move the country forward. It was the foundation of his 1992 campaign and he obviously hopes to return to the centrist themes that many in his party, and in the electorate, believe he abandoned in his first two years in office.

Later Friday, Clinton flew to California. In addition to his planned speech on education, he is scheduled to meet today with state Democratic Party officials in Sacramento and then fly to Los Angeles for a $50,000 per couple fund-raiser at the home of Hollywood movie mogul Steven Spielberg.