Clinton, Gingrich Take High Road in Dialogue on Issues : Politics: The leaders reflect a spirit of civility and cooperation to the delight of a N.H. senior citizens’ meeting. They agree on a bipartisan political reform panel.

President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich co-hosted a unique sort of television talk show here Sunday, and though their discussion covered many of the most divisive issues on the national agenda, the result amounted to a bipartisan love fest.

For most of the past eight months, since the midterm congressional elections, the Democratic chief executive and the Republican leader of the conservative “counterrevolution” frequently have been at each other’s throat in the nation’s capital. But on this sunny New Hampshire afternoon, seated side by side, the two men delighted an attentive audience of senior citizens by making civility the order of the day.

Disdaining the harshness and hyperbole common to contemporary political discourse, Clinton and Gingrich took every opportunity to find points of agreement. And even when they held opposing views, they sought to give each other credit for good intentions and conscientious effort.

“We have a lot of differences, but we also have some areas in which we can work together,” Clinton said in his brief opening remarks at the hastily arranged joint appearance in this western New Hampshire mill town. “I think the most important thing is that we try to identify clearly the places in which we disagree but then make our best effort, our dead-level best effort, to work together to move this country forward.”

Taking his cue from the burst of applause that greeted the President’s tone-setting comments, Gingrich responded in kind.

“I believe all Americans can be told the truth and can actually watch their leaders have honest, open disagreement and talk things out and find common solutions,” he said. “The President and I will now have a dialogue, and maybe the country can learn a little about working together and not just buying [political] commercials and attacking each other.”

Moments later, Gingrich urged the audience to applaud Clinton’s measured response to a question about holding down Medicare costs and health care reform. “The President put his finger on something here where I think we both analyze it slightly differently but we both have the same commitment.”

And the session was not 10 minutes old before the President and the Speaker had literally shaken hands on an agreement to establish a bipartisan commission to find a way to reform campaign financing and lobbying, a bid to curb the power of special interest groups. The idea had been suggested by an audience member who blamed special interests for dooming Clinton’s efforts at health care reform.

The high-minded tone and the focus on matters of policy and substance seemed particularly appropriate to this state, the site of the first primary every presidential election year and a place where voters regard themselves as the nation’s preeminent arbiters of political ambition.

Certainly, if there is one quality that marks each of the two men who sat on the platform here, it is ambition. Clinton, the self-styled “Comeback Kid” of American politics, has already announced his intention to stage what would be his greatest rebound yet: winning reelection after the historic disaster that overtook his party in November as the GOP grabbed control of both houses of Congress.

As for Gingrich, he has set for himself what may be an even more formidable challenge: to dominate and define the national political debate from the podium of the House of Representatives rather than the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

And what may have been most significant about the dialogue in Claremont was that these two gifted and driven politicians each evidently concluded that the best way to win support from an increasingly restless and suspicious electorate was to convince voters that they take the job of governing seriously.

This judgment seems particularly striking in the case of Gingrich, who earned a reputation during his long years in the House minority for aggressiveness and abrasiveness, a style for which he is now paying the penalty by his relatively high negative ratings in public opinion surveys.

During an appearance earlier on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” Gingrich said that, acting on the advice of his mother and his wife, he has been trying to “slightly tone it [his style] down.”

He added: “I’ve been getting a fair amount of toning-down advice over the last six months.”

And judging from his duet with Clinton, he has taken that counsel to heart. “I think just having your leaders chat rather than fight is a good thing,” he told one woman in the audience who, in her question, had complained that while the problems facing the nation continue to worsen, “Congress continues to snip and snipe.”

As if to demonstrate that he does not find fault with Clinton on every issue, Gingrich said he wanted to “commend” him for his response to an appeal from Republican Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole to help break the logjam on the anti-terrorism bill proposed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing.

“The President frankly rose to the occasion, worked out a bipartisan agreement, and I think dramatically changed the tone of the anti-terrorism debate and helped us get something through that was very, very positive,” Gingrich said.

He also praised Clinton’s commitment of U.S. troops to help prevent widespread bloodshed in Haiti, conceding it had worked out better than he had expected.

Not to be out outdone in generosity of spirit, Clinton offered an explanation for some of the harsh rhetoric for which Gingrich is often condemned.

“It is so difficult for us in Washington to communicate with people out in the country, that often the only way to break through is with some fairly extreme statement,” he said. “Speaker Gingrich is real good at that. He can break through like nobody I’ve ever seen.”

The easiest way for either side to “break through” in the debate over Medicare, Clinton noted, was for Gingrich to accuse him of having no plan to save it and for him to charge that the spending changes proposed by Gingrich would cut excessively into benefits.

“The truth is we both believe that, but it’s more complicated than that,” Clinton said. He then called upon the citizenry to help deal with this conundrum.

“There are very often no simple answers to complicated problems. But simple answers move the electorate. If you don’t want that, if you want a reasoned debate, then when your congressmen and senators come home on weekends, you need to tell them that.

“You need to tell them over and over again.”

Disagreements did emerge between the two men. But they were dealt with in a restrained fashion.

Asked about his opposition to an increase in the minimum wage, which Clinton supports, Gingrich said: “I’m very concerned that if you raise the cost of the first job for the poorest person, for example, in the inner city, that what you tend to do is increase black male teen-age unemployment, which is exactly the thing you don’t want to do.”

His goal, he said, “is to have a rapidly growing economy where . . . wages keep going up because people are better educated, more productive.”

Clinton conceded that some economic studies support Gingrich’s argument. But he said the reason he backs a minimum-wage increase is that “I know that a significant percentage of people on the minimum wage are women workers raising their kids on their own. And if we don’t raise the minimum wage this year, then next year, after you adjust for inflation, it will be at a 40-year low.”

It was Clinton who had the event’s last words (“as is appropriate,” Gingrich told the audience). The President called attention to the complex issues now before the country, not only concerning the role of government and economic policy but also about social and cultural mores.

These issues “are now being debated all over again in Washington, maybe for the first time in 50 years, where we’re really going back to basics. And you need to be a part of that. If you want us to work together, instead of figuring out who’s got the best 30-second attack [ad] on the other, you need to really hammer that home. You need to tell your congressman. You need to tell your governor. You need to tell all of us . . . . ‘Be clear about your differences but don’t divide the country.’ ”