As Campaign Gears Up, Clinton Is Determined to Beat Reelection Odds : Politics: Even some advisers concede President faces obstacles in ’96. But whatever the chances, he’s demonstrating a resolve to alter them in his favor.

When the two most potent figures in national politics met at a recent Washington dinner, inevitably their conversation turned to the 1996 presidential election.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) on Saturday recalled that recent conversation with President Clinton and the prediction he made to Clinton that the President had only a 1-in-3 chance of winning reelection.

“I told him I thought he had done some things very, very well but that he really had to face how hard it was going to be,” Gingrich said in an interview here during the Georgia GOP convention.

Clinton and his aides would dispute those odds, although even they admit that reelection will be a struggle. Whatever the chances, however, Clinton has clearly shown he is determined to alter them in his favor. In Washington, even those who most dislike the President no longer talk about the possibility that he might not run again--a favorite topic just after November’s election. Instead, with the 1996 election still 18 months away, Clinton is already running flat-out.

During a recent, nominally nonpolitical, 24-hour sortie into Iowa, for example, the President managed to squeeze in a get-together with farmers, in which he pledged to defend their crop subsidies against Republican budget-cutters. At a talk at Iowa State University, he vowed to protect the federally guaranteed student loan program. He also had a golf match with a prominent campaign fund-raiser and a late-night huddle with leaders of the state Democratic Party.

Republicans, of course, are well aware of Clinton’s focus on holding on to his White House lease, which helps to explain why GOP leaders in the last few days pounded away at Clinton for his performance in Russia. But the loud debate about events abroad had no effect on preparations going forward at home for the campaign.

Already, Clinton has opened a campaign headquarters, picked a staff and begun drawing up his schedule with politics in mind. He faces no competition for his party’s nomination, something no incumbent Democratic President since Franklin D. Roosevelt has been able to say. And despite Gingrich’s negative assessment, Clinton’s aides take comfort in the fact that his poll ratings have risen and were beginning to tick upward even before the Oklahoma City bombing focused attention on his role as a unifying figure in times of national stress.

To help finance his efforts between now and the national Democratic convention, Clinton’s aides have fired off their first volley of fund-raising letters and set a goal of raising $45 million.

Yet, as his top strategists concede, every nickel of that sum will be wasted--and whatever improvements Clinton has enjoyed in his standing will be for naught--if he cannot convince voters that their lives have improved under his stewardship and define himself as a leader in whom Americans are willing to entrust their future.

Clinton, says Harold M. Ickes, his deputy chief of staff and the major-domo of his reelection effort, must “persuade voters, not that he has solved every problem in the country, but that he has moved the country in the right direction.”

As the campaign heats up, Ickes said, Clinton will spend his time “first talking about what he has done and offering his vision of the future, and second by contrasting that with the record of the Republicans.”

“The overall message will be the change of direction,” he added. “Here’s what you had for the 12 years before 1992; here’s where we have moved the country.”

Even if he can convince people of that message, however, Clinton still faces formidable hurdles.

One of the biggest obstacles, in the view of some analysts, is Clinton himself, particularly his tendency to wander off course when some new issue captures his interest and to be defensive when he feels himself under attack.

One aspect of that problem is Clinton’s tendency to surround himself with conflicting advisers. In the wake of the midterm elections, for example, he unsettled some Democrats recently by seeking advice from political consultant Dick Morris, who worked for him in Arkansas but has since concentrated solely on Republican candidates.

Another fundamental problem involves the basic arithmetic of American politics. In the absence of an independent candidacy, like Ross Perot’s in 1992, a look at the map shows that there are more states that the Republicans have a reasonable chance of carrying than there are states in which the Democrats have even a shot at winning. As a result, the Democrats have little margin for error.

“It’s the same problem we had in 1988,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, a member of the White House’s informal strategy team. “It’s not a Republican lock, but it’s a bias in their favor.”

Several big states that Clinton carried in 1992 are in jeopardy now, according to Mark Gersh, director of the National Committee for an Effective Congress, who has taken on the task of analyzing the electoral vote prospects for Clinton. Among the problems: Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and even New York.

Gersh also worries about the biggest electoral prize, California, particularly because he fears the affirmative action initiative expected to be on the state’s ballot in 1996 will be a divisive issue for Democrats.

The most unfriendly terrain for Clinton, Gersh acknowledges, is in his home region. “The South is one part of country that is more ideological than any other part. Conservatives just do better than liberals there at this point.”

Because of those factors, some of Clinton’s own advisers privately concede that the odds are against him in the coming struggle. Most, however, feel the outlook is more favorable than it appeared in the immediate aftermath of November’s Democratic disaster.

“By almost any measure, the President is doing better,” said James Carville, who was Clinton’s chief strategist in 1992 and who is expected to play a major, although as yet undefined, role in 1996.

Much of the improvement, says Geoff Garin, another pollster on the White House team, comes from the President’s return to the economic issues that boosted him into the White House in the first place. The “disconnect” of the Clinton Administration from the economic realities facing middle-class citizens was “the signal failure” of the first two years of his presidency, Garin says. But now, with Clinton’s new stress on tax breaks for middle-class families with young children and college students, Garin contends that “Clinton is back on his game.”

Democratic strategists also take comfort from the fact that as things stand now, Clinton will not face an intraparty challenge to his renomination. “It’s clear that the less complicated the nominating process is, the better it is for Bill Clinton,” said Democratic National Committee Co-Chairman Don Fowler.

Even the upshot of the Nov. 8 election offers a silver lining, in the view of Clinton’s advisers. They point out that the GOP majorities on Capitol Hill, while sometimes overshadowing the President, have freed him from the burden of being the nation’s legislator in chief and allowed him to define himself more sharply by castigating the Republicans as conservative extremists who favor the wealthy over the middle class.

Clinton’s strategy now will blend a small number of his own initiatives--chiefly welfare reform and an increase in the minimum wage--with opposition to Republican initiatives that he believes are wrongheaded.

“If they want to do something good, he’ll sign it,” Carville said. “If they want to do something bad, he’ll pound them on the head. It ain’t rocket science.”

That approach for 1996 contrasts with 1992, when the then-Arkansas governor ran against George Bush as the candidate with big plans for restarting the economy and remaking the health care system. As he gears up for 1996, Clinton isn’t advertising big plans anymore. Aides say the idea of introducing proposals on incremental reform of health care, once the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, has been put off indefinitely.

“The only legislation that is really going to count this year” is welfare reform, Ickes said. Clinton’s proposal would demand greater work incentives than Republicans favor and more lenient guidelines on cutting off benefits than the GOP wants.

Clinton will also try to promote his proposal to raise the minimum wage. Republicans have vowed to oppose that, with House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas saying that he not only opposes increasing the minimum wage but also would prefer to eliminate it altogether. Democrats, however, argue that the public is with them on this issue. “Raising the minimum wage is not a controversial proposition for most Americans,” Garin said. Indeed, a Times Poll earlier this year found that 72% of Americans favor a higher minimum wage, including 62% of Republicans.

In the short run, given budget constraints and the Republican control of Congress, the minimum-wage increase is about the only thing Clinton can do to put a noticeable amount of additional money in the pockets of voters between now and the election--something that many Democrats believe would be the best thing the President could do for his own cause.

The Administration’s own modest proposals for tax reduction would have only limited tangible impact on voters next year, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, the top White House economic official, told The Times recently.

Meanwhile, Clinton has to contend with much more ambitious tax-cut proposals advanced by congressional Republicans--proposals that he complains are skewed in favor of the affluent.

If such legislation passes Congress, Clinton will have to choose between vetoing legislation that gives a break to the taxpayers or signing a law that endorses GOP economic philosophy.

In large part, instead of pushing major initiatives of his own, Clinton will run as the candidate who will restrain Congress’ Republican majority from its most partisan and most ideological enthusiasms: “turning back the clock” on abortion rights, dismantling the welfare system, slashing Medicare, reversing the ban on certain semiautomatic weapons and abolishing regulations on the environment and health and safety.

Clinton intends to drive home those points over the next few weeks in commencement speeches--part of a relatively genteel pace his schedulers are striving to maintain in order to preserve his presidential aura even as he hits key states and key themes on the stump.

In the next few weeks, Clinton plans a talk at Dartmouth College, which will allow him to renew acquaintances with voters in New Hampshire, and one at the Air Force Academy, where he will pound home his efforts to bolster the security of his fellow citizens from troublemakers abroad and lawbreakers at home.

Clinton is also expected to take every opportunity to cast himself as a reformer of government who has cut federal payrolls and streamlined agencies. That role is one that his advisers see as rich in political benefits.

“One of the great ironies of Clinton’s first two years in office was that voters elected him to change Washington but they came to believe that Washington had changed him. It’s very important for the President to re-establish his credentials as a government reformer,” Garin said, suggesting that Clinton claim “he has done more to change government in 30 months than Bob Dole has done in 30 years.”

Shogan reported from Savannah and Washington, and McManus reported from Iowa.