NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Address Signals Shift in Strategy : Budget: President appears to be abandoning attack on GOP spending plans in favor of a conciliatory approach. Some allies are angry.

It wasn’t only his 1996 budget that President Clinton threw out the window Tuesday night. With his new spending plan, the President in one stroke abandoned a long-laid strategy, risked alienating key Democratic constituencies and perhaps set off a war with party allies on Capitol Hill.

Since January, Clinton and congressional Democrats have been following a carefully plotted Plan A, which called for them to pound away at the seeming harshness of GOP spending plans, in hopes that the public would be aroused and that the shellshocked Republicans would edge toward compromise. Now, in Plan B, Clinton is trading confrontation for conciliation.

At a moment when the GOP holds the whip handle in the budget contest, Clinton hopes to establish his leadership and win over the large, moderate slice of the American electorate that longs to have its leaders cooperate. He wants to defuse criticism that he is lukewarm on a balanced federal budget, or a party to the Washington gridlock.

In this, Clinton may be correctly reading popular sentiments that are not apparent to the aides and allies around him. Or he could be blundering on a strategy that costs him key allies while still leaving him ignored by the Republicans he is stretching to accommodate.

“There are risks,” acknowledged one Administration aide. “Risks from start to finish.”

The Democratic leadership in Congress, and most of Clinton’s own aides, thought that the GOP’s proposed cuts in projected spending growth rates gave them a popular issue of enormous power. But there have been signs for months that the President was uneasy with a strategy that had him bashing and defying the newly ascendant Republicans month after month.

In mid-May, Clinton signaled that he would give up his $500-a-child tax credit--the core of his long-promised middle-class tax cut--if the Republicans would make college tuition tax-deductible. Nervous Democrats read this as a sign Clinton would go quite far to claim a victory.

Then, on May 19, Clinton told radio reporters in New Hampshire that he would offer a “counter-budget” to eliminate the federal budget deficit in 10 years. Five days later, he backtracked, saying he hadn’t made such a decision--but he acknowledged, in a shift, that he shared the GOP goal of a balanced budget.

Aides say Clinton has chafed at being attacked by Establishment newspapers for irresponsibly ignoring the deficit in his February budget proposal, when he believed he had paid huge political costs for raising taxes and cutting spending in his first two budgets.

Last Wednesday, the Democratic leadership of Congress made one last desperate attempt to dissuade Clinton from abandoning a strategy they believed would soon set off an outpouring of public outrage with the GOP plans. Joined in their arguments by some White House aides, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) told Clinton that like the hero of the film “Braveheart,” about 13th-Century Scottish rebels, Clinton needed to wait just a little longer to impale the onrushing host of enemy attackers.

On Tuesday, as they reacted with shock to Clinton’s new budget proposal, some congressional aides said they simply did not appreciate how difficult it would be for the President to stick to a position of steady opposition to the Republicans. They said his attacks on the GOP budget plans had been muted, even while his lieutenants were denouncing GOP plans to cut growth of spending in school lunches and Medicare.

Some members of Congress mocked Clinton openly Tuesday. “I think some of us learned some time ago that if you don’t like the President’s position on a particular issue, you simply need to wait a few weeks,” said Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), former chairman of the Joint Economic Committee.

Even Gephardt publicly criticized the new budget plan. “Opening the door to deep Medicare cuts while the Republicans are struggling to pay for their huge tax breaks threatens to make Medicare a political football,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) begged Democratic senators at a lunch not to publicly criticize Clinton. But one senator, usually a Clinton stalwart, said the new budget plan was a sign that Clinton had decided to campaign against his fellow Democrats in an effort to convince voters that he and the GOP leadership of Congress could govern without them.

The new plan was “a self-seeking bid for reelection” to show that “a bifurcated government can work,” this senator said.

It is probably too late in the election cycle for any angry congressional Democrat to challenge Clinton for reelection, analysts say. But the Democratic lawmakers, who still want the budget issues for their own reelection campaigns, can make it harder for Clinton to make his way in the budget fight.

Most senior aides urged Clinton to hold off in the move toward compromise. But Clinton sided with Dick Morris, the political consultant who has won the President’s ear--and prompted dismay within the White House--by urging him to be conciliatory. Vice President Al Gore and Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta weighed in on the side of the new budget proposal, although aides emphasized that Clinton was following his own political instincts on this decision.

Even on Tuesday, however, most senior White House officials still would have preferred that Clinton delay the move, one aide said.

For their part, the Republicans were showing no sign that they intended to reward the President for his peacemaking gesture. “He’s just seen a fast-moving train leaving town, and he’s managed to catch up fast enough to catch the caboose,” said House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.).

Times staff writers Doyle McManus, Edwin Chen and Melissa Healy contributed to this story.