NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton’s Centrist Strategy Throws Party Into Disarray : Democrats: In trying to rise above fray, he’s alienated many allies in Congress. Some talk of a primary challenge.

As they peer ahead anxiously to the 1996 elections, congressional Democrats find themselves in their deepest disarray in nearly 20 years, more divided as a party than they were in November and estranged from their own President to an extent reminiscent of when Jimmy Carter occupied the Oval Office.

The nation’s capital has been sweltering in 90-degree heat, but discontented Democrats on Capitol Hill remain frozen in a political winter so cold that for the first time there is talk of searching for a viable alternative to Bill Clinton for next year’s presidential ticket.

Most observers still dismiss such talk. They say Democratic lawmakers have no wish to inflict upon the party the kind of wounds that fatally weakened Carter’s reelection bid in 1980, when he was challenged in the Democratic primaries by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. But the fact that such heretical talk is becoming more common is in itself a measure of the depths to which Democrats, particularly those in the House of Representatives, have sunk in recent weeks.

To be sure, the seeds of their despair were sown long before Republicans captured control of Congress in November’s elections. But they blossomed earlier this month when Clinton rebuffed pleas by Democratic House and Senate leaders and announced his own plan for balancing the budget. Clinton’s move jerked the rug out from under the Democrats’ leading strategy for reviving their political fortunes--attack GOP budget plans as hardhearted and unfair--and it left many feeling angry and betrayed, and uncertain about what to do next.

“It’s hard to accuse the Republicans of waging class warfare when your commanding general has just defected to their side,” groused a senior House Democrat who requested anonymity.

But if Democrats in Congress were left without a viable strategy, the White House suddenly had a new one: “triangulation,” a term appropriated by GOP pollster and unofficial White House adviser Dick Morris to describe Clinton’s efforts to elevate himself above the political fray by distancing himself equally from congressional Republicans and Democrats.

Clinton, White House aides and congressional allies say, had become fed up with a strategy that relied solely on attacking GOP plans to balance the budget without offering a Democratic alternative. Afraid of looking increasingly irrelevant, Clinton wanted to get in on the Republican budget debate and realized that some kind of balanced-budget plan would be the price of admission, the aides said.

“Members of Congress can criticize, but the President must lead,” said Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.), one of the few Democrats on Capitol Hill who urged Clinton to meet the Republicans halfway. Trying to bridge the widening ideological divide by once more reinventing himself as a centrist “new Democrat” was the only way to do that, according to proponents of triangulation. Henceforth, White House insiders say, the President intends to keep the extremes of both parties at equal arm’s length.

Many congressional Democrats, however, see not a triangle in their future but a noose. To them, it matters little that Clinton’s timetable for balancing the budget is longer (10 years versus seven in the House and Senate GOP plans) or that his mix of Medicare, Medicaid and other spending constraints is less severe.

To them, Clinton’s shift to the center signals his willingness to embrace Republican budget-cutting principles and implies a political surrender to the GOP’s fundamental goals of reducing the role of government, lowering taxes and balancing the budget at the expense of the large entitlement programs long championed by Democrats. For once, these congressional Democrats concurred with House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who said the President’s budget reversal “took from the hands of Democrats the knife with which they had hoped to slit our throats.”

But Vice President Al Gore, when asked Sunday why Clinton would want to “shoot” liberal lawmakers by distancing himself from their budget strategy, said: “The President’s attempting to steer a responsible course that can bring our country together. That’s what he’s supposed to do as President. We’re not shooting anybody, and a majority of Democrats on Capitol Hill, I believe, support the President’s course. Those who have disagreed have been very vocal about it.” Gore spoke on the ABC-TV news program “This Week With David Brinkley.”

In placing one foot on Republican ground, Clinton seems to be responding to polling data suggesting that public distrust of both parties is so deep that Americans feel safer with divided government. “The message is that it’s OK to have a Republican Congress as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House,” complained a senior House Democrat, adding that many Democrats suspect the President of trying to improve his reelection chances at the expense of theirs.

Many outside observers agree. Of Clinton’s abrupt shift to the center, Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker said: “The ship has just deserted the sinking rats.”

This, of course, is not the first time that Clinton and Democrats in Congress have quarreled bitterly in public. From their early differences over grazing fees and a BTU energy tax, to their agony over last year’s negotiations on anti-crime legislation, the two partners have rarely danced to the same music.

Nor is it exactly news that the Democrats are divided between the centrists, whom Clinton is trying to emulate, and the liberals, who dominate the party’s congressional leadership.

But, like a couple whose dysfunctional relationship has witnessed one too many marital crises, both sides seem to be willing to acknowledge that their differences may have become irreconcilable.

The separation, according to University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, came when Clinton and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) proposed competing budget plans at the outset of the new GOP-controlled Congress. “What’s happening this time is the official ratification of the divorce,” Sabato said.

Although few Democrats were willing to be quoted on the record, all who were asked readily agreed with observers who liken Clinton’s current relations with Democrats in Congress to the Cold War atmosphere that prevailed when Carter was President. “This year especially, there has been a real meltdown,” acknowledged Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.).

Because conventional wisdom holds that the political fates of a President and his party are inextricably bound, many observers predict the Democrats will have no choice in the end but to follow Clinton’s lead on the budget, however stubbornly they refuse to do so now.

“Running against Bill Clinton may seem like good politics in some Democratic districts at the moment. . . . But if he is not reelected, then any fantasy we have about recapturing the House will go directly out the window,” said Howard Paster, Clinton’s former congressional liaison who is now with the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton.

But it is also a measure of how hot the passions are running at the moment that an increasing number of Democrats are privately debating whether to support a primary challenge to Clinton next year, should a credible contender enter the race. One name frequently mentioned: Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey.

Asked recently about making a presidential bid next year, Bradley said: “No, I have no expectations. . . . I have made a calculated decision to be definitively ambiguous . . . or is it ambiguously definitive?”

“The volume of talk against a sitting President within his own party is . . . reminiscent of the levels reached in 1978 and 1979,” when discontentment with Carter led to the challenge by Kennedy, said Washington political analyst Charles E. Cook.

Fueling this kind of talk is a growing belief that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Clinton’s political interests--and with them his chances of being reelected--no longer run parallel with those of his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill. “What’s really beginning to change things is the sense that Clinton is going to be a major liability for Democrats running for reelection,” a senior House Democrat said, adding that at the White House the feeling “appears to be mutual.”

Indeed, most Democrats interviewed last week said they got the impression, after talking to congressional leaders and Administration officials, that the White House almost wanted them to criticize Clinton’s new budget proposals. “Getting us to say that he was cutting too much seemed like a good thing to them. . . . The message they want to project is that Clinton can’t be all bad if he’s being attacked by liberal members of Congress,” said a liberal member of Congress.

“It’s the subliminally divided government strategy,” Sabato said. “Clinton is saying to the voters that: ‘Not only have I learned to live with the choice you made in 1994, I’ve learned to like it.’ It’s an enormously risky strategy but perhaps the best one for him to pursue at the moment.”

By week’s end, it became apparent that the White House had underestimated the depths of resentment toward Clinton, as some Democratic leaders, such as Minority Whip David E. Bonior of Michigan, derided Clinton rather than his budget plan. The White House “miscalculated” in thinking that the criticism would be confined to “the substance of his budget proposals,” a senior Democratic strategist said. Instead, Clinton’s character and his “tendency to flip-flop on issues” came under fire, the strategist said.

Indeed, while Clinton seemed to have few defenders on Capitol Hill last week, perhaps the most damning criticism came from Democrats who sought to dismiss his new budget proposals as irrelevant.

“Who knows if this is a permanent split?” shrugged Schroeder. “The only thing we know about the White House is that the positions it adopts are always changing.”