Clinton, Aides See Compromise as Election Key : Politics: They plan to cast President as moderate in looming budget fight. Strategy involves ensuring that any impasse will be viewed as GOP’s fault.

For years, President Clinton’s critics have complained that he is a man of few fixed principles, too ready to compromise when the going gets rough. This fall, as the most dramatic federal budget debate in decades gathers steam, Clinton hopes to work a feat of political alchemy: to turn his blurry image as the Great Compromiser into a plus.

Whatever the battle’s outcome in terms of taxes and spending, the President and his advisers have one overriding political goal: to cast Clinton as the voice of the moderate American center, and paint Republican leaders in Congress as right-wing extremists.

“There are some who say that there should be no compromise this autumn,” Clinton said in Selma, Calif., Tuesday, taking aim at Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas. “But I say that good people of goodwill want us to find common ground, want us to find honorable compromise.”

In this strategy, whether there is a messy, government-stopping “train wreck” this fall is less important to Clinton than making sure the Republicans are blamed for any such impasse. It is a strategy that looks beyond the budget battle--the outcome of which is mostly beyond Clinton’s control--to next year’s general election campaign.

The emphasis on positioning for the 1996 campaign is inspired in large part by the President’s mugwump adviser, consultant Dick Morris, who has been urging Clinton for most of the year to place himself smack in the center, at a careful distance from the Republican right and the mostly liberal Democrats in Congress.

In this new formulation, the President is not entirely limited to conciliatory sweet talk; he is free to bash the opposition for extremism, even while insisting that he himself is reaching out for compromise.

Thus, while he has been repeating the phrase “common ground” in nearly every recent speech, Clinton has increasingly assailed the GOP for risking the health of Medicare beneficiaries; for dangerously shortchanging the causes of worker safety, clean air and water; and for jeopardizing economic growth and social cohesion with cuts in education.

The GOP’s deep budget cuts, he warned last week, would “wreck the fabric of health care and educational commitments of our country.”

In positioning himself for maximum political leverage in the budget fight, Clinton has one huge advantage over the opposition: Because he is unopposed for the Democratic nomination, he is free to campaign for support from the broad middle of the political spectrum, while Dole and other Republican congressional leaders feel obliged to fix their attention on the narrower and more conservative band of the spectrum that is key to winning the GOP presidential primaries.

“Increasingly, the Republicans are preoccupied with a nomination contest that pulls them sort of inexorably to the right of the political spectrum. . . . They are off debating all kinds of issues that satisfy very extreme constituencies,” White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said. “There is an opening there, the President believes, for him to come along and frame some of these issues . . . in a way that tries to develop some kind of consensus in a much broader place on the political spectrum.”

While Clinton waded into politically risky issues such as affirmative action and immigration during his California trip, the scripts for his public appearances now revolve mostly around a short list of issues with centrist popular punch. This week and for the next month, for instance, he will be talking about his defense of federal education spending, direct student loans, Medicare and Medicaid, government streamlining--threads united by their connection to the budget issues that now occupy the foreground.

“You could call the budget the leitmotif for the next month,” one White House aide said.

Some Clinton advisers see a scenario in which the President can emerge from the budget fight having it both ways--appearing to be compromising and cooperative, yet not abandoning principle.

Clinton’s opening posture of cooperation, they say, will inevitably be followed by confrontation, and by the veto of some of the spending bills that will come before him before Christmas. Confrontation is inevitable, these aides believe, simply because of the pressure within the Republican caucus to defy the President.

But if the bills are revised and adopted after a veto, then Clinton can claim to have been cooperative, yet principled.

“If they reach compromise after a veto, then they’ll have the best of all possible worlds,” said one informal adviser. “He’ll have talked compromise at the beginning and end, but stood firm in the middle.”

The strategy appears in large part driven by recent opinion polls that show the public wants to see a compromise between the Administration and the Congress, and will blame any politician who tries to block one.

Clinton advisers, looking at polls that show the President’s public approval ratings flat or slightly up--and the Republicans’ plummeting--say the repositioning is working already.

In a CNN/USA Today poll last week, 58% of those responding said Clinton had cooperated enough with Congress, but only 38% felt Congress had been sufficiently cooperative with the President.

“The first two years [of the Clinton Administration] were a debate about taxes, and the Democrats lost,” pollster Stanley M. Greenberg, a longtime Clinton adviser, said. “This is a debate about Medicare, and the Republicans will lose.”

Plenty of outside analysts agree that Clinton’s position has become stronger since the beginning of the summer. But many argue that this is due less to his own cleverness than to the troubles the GOP has encountered as it has edged away from the middle to complete its difficult legislative agenda.

While many polls show Clinton’s approval ratings hovering in the mid-40% range--where it has been for most of his time in office--the approval of congressional Republicans has fallen sharply since the aftermath of the 1994 mid-term elections.

One sign of Clinton’s improved fortunes is in the changed views of the budget proposal he offered last spring.

In June, when Clinton moved toward the Republican position with a revised budget that sought to eliminate the deficit in 10 years, he was lambasted for following the GOP lead; the spending plan itself was attacked as incomplete and inadequate.

But with the passage of three months, Clinton has come to look curiously stronger for the move, some analysts say. He can now argue that he has responsibly offered a spending plan, even as the Republicans remain divided over a proposal that has become bogged down in the vast complexities of tax cuts, health and welfare reform.

“I offered an alternative balanced budget. . . . I’ve said what I thought we had to do,” Clinton said last week.

Last month, Clinton’s new budget even won a measure of praise from a group of respected private economists.

“He may have achieved a sort of forward fumble,” said Kevin Phillips, the conservative commentator.

If Clinton is in an improved position, he still faces strains with Democrats on Capitol Hill.

Indeed, Clinton’s talk of “honorable compromise” has some congressional Democrats worried, because they fear the President’s yen for finding a middle ground may prompt him to settle for less than they might gain in a hand-to-hand budget battle. All too fresh is the memory of Clinton’s about-face in June on the budget, which provoked some congressional allies to complain that Clinton had abandoned them and Democratic principles.

But even if Clinton and the Hill Democrats emerge from the budget saga divided, that might not be so bad either, at least not in the view of consultant Morris and others in the White House. They believe that keeping a safe distance from the largely liberal congressional Democrats might be the wiser course.