Clinton Urges Voters to Seize Upon Legislative Defeats

President Clinton cast the approaching congressional elections Friday as a referendum on the domestic programs he failed to get the Republican-led Congress to pass, including his proposals to increase school construction and the minimum wage.

Setting out on another day of campaigning--this time for Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun’s uphill effort to win a second term--Clinton said that the flurry of bipartisan cooperation in which the 105th Congress is rushing to a close should not color the reality of the last year.

“Eight days of progress cannot replace or make up for eight months of partisanship, to protect our patients, to modernize our schools, to raise the minimum wage, to look out for the 21st century and reform Social Security and Medicare in the right way,” he said before leaving the White House.

“We need a Congress that will put people before politics, progress ahead of partisanship,” Clinton said at a ceremony in the Rose Garden marking Thursday’s budget accord.

Still, the bipartisan tenor of the last week left Clinton in a happy place: He won much of the high-priority funding he had sought and went through a rare week in which the name Monica S. Lewinsky and the subject of his potential impeachment barely entered public discourse.

Clinton’s new approach to the campaign, focusing on the measures he wants tackled next year, was picked up in Washington by House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who said of the voters: “I hope and believe they will choose the representatives who will come here with the passion to get these unfinished issues done.”

But, speaking on Capitol Hill, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) chastised Clinton for his opposition to a tax cut of as much as $80 billion that Republicans favored. Clinton had insisted that Congress give priority to Social Security issues before “squandering” the budget surplus achieved this year.

“If the president had been engaged in the governing process before these last eight days, American families might now be getting the tax cut they deserved,” Armey said.

High on Clinton’s Wish List

Remaining on the agenda that Clinton outlined here and in Washington:

* Protecting the Social Security program so that it can meet the demands that will be placed on it when members of the baby boom generation begin retiring early in the next century.

* A program to alleviate overcrowding by increasing school construction.

* A “patients’ bill of rights” to protect the medical care options of those in health maintenance organizations.

* Stiffening campaign finance rules.

* Legislation to fight the use of tobacco.

* An increase in the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage. A Clinton-supported plan to increase it by $1 over two years, raising the wages of 12 million workers, was killed when nearly every Republican in the Senate voted against it.

Each measure, he said, was defeated or set aside by the Republican majority’s partisanship.

Still, Clinton said, the spending plan “is a great budget for the United States of America.”

Indeed, the president said, the week that produced the budget agreement offered other heartening news for which he took credit.

He singled out the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s united support for the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and the start of the Middle East summit on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He also cited the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the primary negotiators of the Northern Ireland peace agreement--”something,” he said, “that my administration and our country have been heavily involved in.”

Saluting the unity of the Democrats and trumpeting his role in the budget agreement, Clinton said that the deal “would not have been possible unless the members of the Democratic Caucus in Congress had been united behind me.”

The president, who spoke at the downtown Union League Club, was greeted by 200 protesters who, kept behind police barricades, called for his impeachment.

Moseley-Braun, introducing Clinton before departing for a campaign debate, drew applause from her contributors when she said that her demand that his opponents “leave this man alone and let him do his job” was met with an ovation in southern Illinois.

Some of the tables at the fund-raising luncheon were only half-filled, but, at a minimum of $2,500 a person, Democratic Party officials said the event was expected to bring in $500,000.

Party operatives were not sanguine about Moseley-Braun’s chances of defeating Republican Peter Fitzgerald, who had a 12-point lead in one recent poll.

One official said that Clinton’s visit to Chicago reflected his sense of obligation to help the only African American woman in the Senate, rather than any optimism that she could overcome both the stumbles that have marked her Senate tenure and Fitzgerald’s well-financed campaign.

Times staff writer Janet Hook in Washington contributed to this story.