Clinton Aimed to Show GOP He Remains a Force

President Clinton set out Tuesday evening to send Republicans in Congress a bracing message: He may be on trial in the Senate, he may carry the tarnish of impeachment by the House, but he can still seize the advantage on the nation’s political battleground.

Clinton’s tone in his sixth State of the Union address was lofty and conciliatory. He gave not a word to the tawdry scandal and the bitter debate that made him only the second U.S. president to suffer impeachment.

Instead, implicitly dismissing his trial as a sideshow, he detailed a lengthy agenda for a post-impeachment world, with two apparent aims.

One was to make the case that the scandal has not crippled his presidency--to show that he still has two years’ worth of activism in him.

The other--voiced only gently by the president but more bluntly by his aides--was to paint a sharp and partisan contrast between his Democratic agenda and that of his Republican opponents.

“The Republicans have now been in charge of Congress for four years, and I don’t know what they’ve got to show for it,” said Clinton advisor Douglas B. Sosnik, briefing reporters about the speech. “We’re the only ones on the playing field with ideas . . . [about] aging, education, maintaining economic strength.”

“The Republicans are turning into the party of impeachment and nothing more,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman crowed. “The president is laying out an agenda that’s very popular. The Republicans can either choose life and embrace it, or dig their own political grave.”

The core of Clinton’s 1999 program, a proposal to use the federal budget surplus to “save” Social Security and Medicare, was an unabashed return to traditional Democratic Party themes that cheered the president’s loyalists and irritated his Republican opponents.

“Thumbs up,” said House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who led Clinton’s doomed defense against impeachment in the House.

“I don’t buy it,” growled Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), one of the jurors who will decide the president’s fate in the Senate.

Clinton’s proposals also include new programs in education and health care, new money to train welfare recipients for work, and a dollar-an-hour increase in the federal minimum wage.

Equally significant was an element that was missing from the president’s plan: any real bow to the Republicans’ core goal of tax cuts.

“We aren’t triangulating anymore,” a Democratic congressional aide said, referring to Clinton’s 1995 strategy of finding a middle ground between the two parties.

Main Focus Falls on ‘Entitlement’ Programs

Some House Democrats had worried that Clinton might seek a compromise on tax cuts. Instead, his call for holding back projected surplus revenues of more than $4 trillion over the next 15 years prompted both sides to indulge in drawing old-fashioned party lines.

“Republicans favor taxpayers, and President Clinton favors government,” said Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.), a conservative leader in the Senate. “Under President Clinton’s proposal tonight, government grows, government grows in every way imaginable.”

Nickles and other Republicans have had the glum experience in recent weeks of contemplating polls that show almost two-thirds of the nation opposes removing the president from office, and public approval for the GOP is dropping as Congress has concentrated on Clinton’s impeachment.

Clinton once gloried in distinguishing himself from his party’s mostly liberal leadership. But this year, after a bruising battle over impeachment that rallied liberals around the besieged president--and a congressional election that brought them within hailing distance of a majority in the House--Clinton and Gephardt have drawn closer together than ever.

To be sure, Clinton’s proposals included centrist “New Democrat” themes along with his traditional points. He called for demanding greater accountability from local schools that receive federal aid, including an end to “social promotion.” He reaffirmed his reliance on private sector programs to wean people off welfare.

But his main focus was Social Security and Medicare, the two giant “entitlement” programs whose reform was to be the crowning achievement of his second term. And there, his proposals were largely traditional: a new influx of money from the swelling budget surplus but no major structural reforms beyond allowing the Social Security system to invest some of its funds in the stock market.

Clinton did propose a new program of government-administered individual retirement accounts similar to the 401(k) accounts offered by many private investors. But aides made it clear that this would be in addition to Social Security, not part of the traditional pension plan.

Even some moderate Democrats said they thought the president was too cautious on that point. “Would we like to wind up with individual accounts as part of the basic Social Security program? The answer is yes,” said Al From, chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. “But I think he’s trying to thread a needle on Social Security. A year ago, nobody would have thought there would be any movement at all on private accounts.”

On closer inspection, Clinton’s Social Security proposal was symbolically impressive--but practically modest.

In effect, Clinton simply declared that the swelling budget surplus was big enough to allow him to declare victory over the nation’s long-running entitlement problems, without much further action.

Indeed, he said the surplus now appears big enough to save not only Social Security, but Medicare as well, with enough left over to improve education and boost military spending.

The $2.7 trillion of surplus he proposed to consecrate to Social Security turned out roughly equal to the amount by which the pension plan’s revenues are projected to exceed outlays during the 15-year period. In a sense, Clinton is proposing to save Social Security by leaving it alone and not spending its surplus on other federal programs.

That left some policy experts worried.

“This proposal takes the notion that it’s a crisis and that we have to slash and burn off the table,” said Marilyn Moon of the Urban Institute, a trustee of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. “For those people who would like to see major structural changes in the programs or get rid of them altogether, that’s a disadvantage--because the president’s proposals say that incremental change can solve the problem.”

‘I Think You’ll See a Very Activist President’

But Clinton aides expressed satisfaction--because the proposal fulfilled the president’s promise to save Social Security, and increased chances of saving his legacy from being dominated by the ignominy of impeachment.

“If you go back to the seventh year of Eisenhower or the seventh year of Reagan and measure what we’re talking about tonight, I think you’ll see a very activist president,” Sosnik said. “One of the messages . . . is our intent to be as aggressive as possible--all the way until the end of his years as president.”

Times staff writer Alissa J. Rubin contributed to this story.