NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Finds New Team, Theme for Reelection Run

When President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton convene the weekly reelection strategy session in the family quarters of the White House, one figure is conspicuously absent--the self-described Redneck Rasputin of the 1992 campaign, James Carville.

Carville claims he’s happy to be out of it, having acquired a wife, a baby and a book contract in the years since he presided volcanically over the celebrated campaign “war room” in Little Rock, Ark.

But, pressed further, the normally glib and assertive Cajun finds his tongue tied.

“It’s a good sign you’ve got a lot of new faces,” he finally asserts, unconvincingly. “A different kind of campaign calls for different people.”

Indeed, as Clinton enters the campaign year, both the theme on which he is running and the cast around him--with the notable exceptions of the first lady and White House advisor George Stephanopoulos--differ markedly from those of 1992.

The best known of the new team is consultant Dick Morris, who in 1982 helped Clinton resurrect his career after he’d been tossed out of the Arkansas governorship at the end of his first term. But along with Morris are several more new faces: the longtime Democratic advertising group run by Robert Squier--Squier Knapp Ochs; the polling firm Mark Penn & Doug Schoen; hard-edged media consultant Hank Sheinkopf of New York; and video producer Marius Penczner of Tennessee.

They have supplanted Carville and his former partner, Paul Begala, so-called new Democrat pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, advisor Mark Mellman and media consultant Mandy Grunwald--all of whom, to one extent or another, Clinton blamed for the failure of his health care initiative and the Democrats’ loss of Congress in 1994.

Tailoring His Appeal

The advent of Morris, who spent much of the last decade working for Republicans, has been accompanied by a fundamental strategic shift underlying Clinton’s reelection drive. As the State of the Union speech and other remarks over the last year indicate, Clinton is pursuing an “upscale” strategy, aimed at relatively comfortable suburban voters more concerned with the overall direction of society and the cost of government than with where their next paycheck is coming from.

Come fall, Clinton may well shift back to a more traditional, Democratic base. For now, however, aides say Clinton has concluded that suburban voters, with family incomes roughly between $50,000 and $100,000, will be the fulcrum of the election. He is tailoring his appeal to steal them from the GOP.

Thus, some of his most memorable lines in the State of the Union were about “values”--violence on television, the shrillness of public discourse, school uniforms.

The changing cast of characters reflects the differences between insurgency and incumbency, or, to use the kind of martial metaphor so common in politics, between taking ground and holding ground.

The two operations require different kinds of field commanders, said Ann Lewis, communications director and deputy campaign manager for the reelection.

“Our biggest vulnerability is fighting the last war,” she said. “Generals go to the war college to freshen their war-fighting skills. The president reaches out to a broader mix of people.”

Some of those gone from the reelection picture--Los Angeles lawyers Mickey Kantor and John Emerson, for example--are in top government jobs and are barred by conflict-of-interest rules from taking overtly political positions. Others were felled by fatigue. Still others, however, fell victim to political purges after the 1994 midterm election disaster and the president’s insatiable appetite for new faces and new ideas.

After the midterm debacle, “It has taken a long while for him to get his political bearings back,” said one former senior advisor who was jettisoned at the end of 1994. “He has a tendency to blame everyone but himself.”

“When your luck runs out, you buy a new pair of dice,” the advisor added. “That’s who he is.”

Morris is actually quite an old pair of dice, whose association with Clinton dates back 15 years.

After Clinton’s loss of the governorship in 1980, it was Morris who urged him to apologize to voters, repudiate many actions of his first term and seek accommodation with his political enemies.

Although the parallels between that approach and today’s are not exact, they’re close enough. Clinton caused his staff to wince last year when he apologized publicly for “raising your taxes too much” and for presenting a welfare reform plan that he considered too weak.

Tension Level Up

Those moves have caused considerable tension within the White House. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Harold M. Ickes, for example--a liberal New York labor lawyer who is the de facto director of the 1996 campaign-- is known to despise Morris and many of his policy ideas. (Like all reelection efforts, this one will be run almost exclusively out of the White House.)

Ickes and Morris are “not personally close,” conceded Doug Sosnick, the White House political director.

For now, however, the two have agreed on a division of labor that avoids open warfare.

Ickes is in charge of putting together political organizations in key battleground states and vetting top personnel for the reelection effort. Morris oversees broader political strategy and message.

A major part of that message will require Clinton to strike a balance. He wants to reap the electoral fruit of three years of steady, if unspectacular, growth in the economy while not seeming to abandon the concerns of those who have lost their jobs or seen their incomes fall.

“You’re the incumbent and you want to run on a message that the economy is doing well,” said one top White House official who participates in the reelection strategy sessions. “On the other hand, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that people feel a lot of anxiety about their economic futures. You have to craft a message that gives the president credit for improvement in the economy but without seeming uncaring, callous and unconcerned . . . .”

The Clinton team sees the coming year in three distinct phases. In the first, which will culminate with Tokyo and Moscow summits in April, Clinton plans what one advisor called a “modified Rose Garden strategy,” in which the president will try to exploit the media power and majesty of the office and do few overtly political events.

He will, however, make cameo appearances in important primary states--New Hampshire is on the schedule for this weekend, Iowa next weekend.

April Kickoff

By April, White House officials expect the general election campaign will in essence begin, even though the party conventions are not until August.

“May to July is the period of maximum peril,” Stephanopoulos said. “The Republicans will have a nominee and focus all of their attention on Bill Clinton. If there’s a budget deal, the focus will be on Whitewater and affirmative action, the so-called character and culture issues.”

Clinton, however, will have a major advantage during that period. The putative Republican nominee is likely to be nearly out of money, having spent it all on winning his party’s nomination. Clinton, having avoided a serious primary challenge, will be able to spend his huge bank account either on bolstering his image in key states or on attacking his likely opponent.

The third phase is the compressed general election campaign, from Labor Day through November. The Clintonites expect Ross Perot to make good on his promise to field a third-party candidate--most likely himself, they believe.

There is also the expectation that the fall campaign will be a bare-knuckles affair and that when the leaves begin to turn, Clinton may again change players.

Former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers predicted that Morris would be ousted after trouble arises for Clinton in the spring or summer, as it almost inevitably will.

“Every time he climbs up a hill,” Myers said, “there’s some peril waiting.”

And who will be waiting to pick up the pieces and charge headlong into combat?

“I suspect they’re going to need somebody to get after the Republicans in a pithy way, and that’s what I do,” Carville said. “In the end, I’ll probably be involved.”

Times Senior Washington Correspondent Jack Nelson contributed to this story.