Support for GOP Policies Falls, Poll Finds : Public opinion: Survey suggests that Democratic attacks have hit home. Clinton’s job-approval rating reaches high for year.

One day after President Clinton sought to conciliate the GOP with a new balanced-budget plan, a poll suggested that his now-abandoned strategy of confrontation had been working just fine as a political tactic.

The poll, from the Times Mirror Center for The People & The Press, found that public approval of Republican policies has fallen to its lowest point since the GOP’s electoral blowout of last November, and that more Americans now disapprove (45%) than approve (41%.) of those policies. The GOP approval rating was down from 52% last December, a month after the midterm elections. The survey suggested that this steady decline could be largely traced to rising anxiety, particularly among the elderly, about GOP proposals to restrain future Medicare spending.

The survey of 1,500 adults, taken between June 8 and June 11, also found that Clinton’s job-approval rating has reached 50%, a high for the year, while his disapproval rating stands at 40%. The poll had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

The poll’s finding largely echoed the results of a Times Poll taken between June 9 and June 11, which found 36% of Americans generally approving of the GOP agenda and 43% disapproving.

The poll seemed to bolster the argument of congressional Democrats and some White House aides that Clinton was benefiting politically by opposing Republican budget tightening. “There aren’t many presidents who would change course when their poll numbers are rising,” one Democratic congressional aide said recently.

Medicare spending was the second most closely watched news topic in the survey period, exceeded only by the Oklahoma City bombing, the poll found. Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed said they were paying “very close attention” to the Medicare debate, and another 34% described themselves as paying a “fair amount” of attention to the contentious issue.

In the aftermath of the release of the new Clinton budget on Tuesday, White House officials and some other Democrats have been arguing that the strategy shift will not deprive the President of all opportunities to run against the GOP plans. Though Clinton has proposed to reduce the growth of projected Medicare spending by about $150 billion from projections over the next decade, the GOP plans would pare far more and they include upper-income tax cuts and other elements that make promising political targets, these Democrats contend.

“The President is still well-positioned to press the contrast with the Republicans,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster in Washington. “I don’t think the argument that the President has ceded a lot of ground need be true, if he presses the argument.”