Clinton Address to Focus on the Future, Aides Say

The White House hope was that President Clinton would stride to the podium for his State of the Union Address on Tuesday with a fresh victory on a budget deal, providing a big reason for voters to give him a second term.

Instead, with the budget talks all but dead and partisan rancor rising, Clinton has turned to an alternative strategy for the year’s principal ceremonial speech: He will try to step around the messy budget spectacle by looking to the future and focusing on problem-solving that puts minimal strain on the Treasury.

After three years of January addresses laden with discussion of federal programs, Clinton this year plans to sketch out a vision of the country’s challenges and what he sees as the approaching “age of promise,” aides say. And to the extent that he offers new programs, they will call for action by communities--rather than bureaucracies--to fight crime, keep young people in school and reduce pregnancy among teenagers.

Clinton is also expected to propose new rules to ensure that employees are able to take their pension benefits from one job to another--an approach that would require little new federal spending but is likely to carry wide appeal.

“The president wants to take the discussion into the 21st century,” said White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry. But, he said, “the president is realistic: This is not a Congress in which he can hand them an aggressive legislative agenda and expect to make much headway.”

Even more than usual this year, Clinton faces a tough choice on how much of a partisan edge to put into the speech. For maximum effect, he will want to appear above the political fray. His strongest poll numbers have come at moments when he has appeared the least partisan and most compromising, pollsters say.

Yet the address won’t be free of party warfare. The address is, in a way, the kickoff of his presidential campaign. So Clinton will want to highlight his differences with the GOP field. He will want to lay out his basic argument that unlike the opposition, he will couple fiscal responsibility with compassion for society’s weakest.

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Given the current state of high political friction between the White House and strong-willed conservative Republicans, even the speech itself has become a fractious issue.

Republican leaders have warned that if Clinton uses this address to bash them on the budget, they will retaliate by providing even less money to operate federal agencies when a temporary funding measure for fiscal 1996 runs out on Friday. “We’re waiting for Tuesday night to decide what we’ll do on Friday,” one GOP aide said.

Last year, Clinton got applause from members of both parties in most of the 96 interruptions in the record 81-minute speech. But this year, with the budget issue boiling and the elections nearing, he will face a tougher crowd.

“This will be the toughest audience he’s ever played,” said Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s former press secretary. “But he’s got a huge opportunity with this speech, and one the Republicans won’t be able to match.”

With that in mind, Clinton isn’t likely to refrain from saying some things that the Republicans don’t like. He is expected to argue again that a budget agreement is in reach, and that only a GOP desire for a tax cut and sharp cuts in government are keeping the two sides from making a deal.

And Clinton also may wheel out one of his favorite political arguments: that he will not allow the GOP to inflict policies that would badly curb Medicare and Medicaid, environmental protection and aid to education.

Administration aides also expect these features in the speech:

* A declaration that the state of the union is “strong.”

* An assertion that this administration has produced a strong economy, with low interest rates and inflation, and 7.7 new million jobs--even though there are now signs of a slowdown.

* A list of Clinton’s foreign policy accomplishments, including progress toward peace in Bosnia, Haiti, Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

* A strong ladling of optimism about the country’s future, a theme favored by Mark Penn, a White House pollster.

And aides expect Clinton to invite one or more guests with special audience appeal to the House chamber’s balcony to witness the speech. Last year, the Clintons invited young members of Clinton’s national service program, a Marine who served in Haiti and the family of a deceased World War II Marine hero to sit next to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The president has been preparing the speech in his customary fashion by talking to a range of staff members, Cabinet officers and outsiders. These include several dozen political scientists and what McCurry calls “political and moral philosophers,” such as writer Francis Fukuyama, international affairs scholar Walter Russell Meade, humorist Garrison Keillor, Boston University President John Silber and social scientist Robert D. Putnam. They were asked to write mini-essays on the country’s future, which were compiled into a book for Clinton.

Still unclear is whether Clinton will change his past habit of rewriting his speech four or five times--with the redrafting continuing right up until moments before his appearance--and whether he will try to keep his message relatively brief.

Some staff members say that despite White House contentions that last year’s lengthy address was a great popular success, the White House is now determined to keep this year’s speech much shorter. But one administration official says it is not yet clear that everyone agrees on this point.

“All the staff folks seem on board with a shorter speech,” the official said. “We’ll have to see if the president is.”