Speech Offers Soaring Words, Vague Goals

By DOYLE McMANUS

Jan. 21, 1997 12 AM PT

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TIMES WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

WASHINGTON — Four years ago, Bill Clinton came to Washington brimming with new ideas--from economic development and health care to political reform--to launch a troubled America toward a brighter 21st century.

On Monday, Clinton began his second try at making an indelible mark on the nation’s history. His rhetoric was just as soaring as in 1993--but this time he had few specific goals to offer.

History has been much on the president’s mind. And he compared his moment to those of Thomas Jefferson, who helped transform the nation in the early years of the 19th century, and Theodore Roosevelt, who shaped it in the first decade of the 20th.

But history has dealt this president a difficult hand. His great predecessors made their marks with bold deeds. But Clinton--confronted by a Republican Congress and shackled by his own promise to balance the budget--is seeking instead to make his imprint with a more elusive message, a new model of government.

“We have resolved for our time a great debate over the role of government,” the president said--an assertion that many Republicans and some Democrats would question.

The nation wants “a government that is smaller, lives within its means and does more with less,” he explained. But under some circumstances, he added, “government should do more, not less.”

To make the nation ready for the next century, he said he would work to balance the budget and reform Social Security and Medicare.

But the domestic priorities of Clinton’s 1993 inauguration--”investing” in jobs, education and health care--were largely absent. Instead, the president said, it is up to citizens to find a new spirit of responsibility and community and to use their new, smaller government as a source of “tools” to shape the nation’s future.

“There weren’t many specifics,” said a disappointed-sounding William A. Galston, a former Clinton aide who has urged the president to make education a higher priority. “This was the speech of a king, not a prime minister.”

Clinton has often said that one of the mistakes he made during his first two years in office was to act as a “prime minister”--a partisan figure immersed in the details of legislation--instead of a more transcendent national leader.

To be sure, an inaugural address is not the occasion for a president to list the details of his legislative agenda. Clinton will get a chance to do that on Feb. 4, the scheduled date for his State of the Union address.

Still, Clinton’s speech on Monday soared unusually high above the partisan fray--to the point of avoiding nearly any controversy.

Aides said that the president’s favorite parts of the speech were his calls for national unity, racial reconciliation and an end to “petty bickering and extreme partisanship.”

Those themes have been part of Clinton’s public life for many years, but he has increasingly turned to them during the last two years--ever since Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994--as part of what he calls his “bully pulpit” role.

Aides said that role has helped strengthen the president’s image as a national leader and bolstered his standing in public opinion polls. And those high poll ratings, they argued, translate into more power in negotiations with Congress.

A recent Gallup Poll found that 62% of the public approves of Clinton’s performance in office, the highest rating he has ever scored--and the equal of Ronald Reagan’s rating at the time of his second inaugural in 1985.

The president’s rhetoric carried another political message as well.

When he denounced “petty bickering and extreme partisanship,” Clinton appeared to mean--at least in part--his opponents’ attempts to make political capital of the mounting investigations of his conduct as president and while governor of Arkansas.

Addressing the dozens of members of Congress on the platform on the Capitol’s west front, he said: “America demands and deserves big things from us, and nothing big ever came from being small.”

Only a few feet away, the Republican leaders of Congress, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), applauded politely.

Among the mostly Democratic, button-festooned crowd that massed outside the Capitol to hear the president, his call for an end to partisan wrangling proved the biggest applause line of his speech.

Later in the day, hosting the traditional congressional lunch for the president inside the Capitol, Gingrich proclaimed: “While we may disagree on some things, here you are among friends.”

Only last week, in a gesture that demonstrated his desire to banish all such investigations from the nation’s agenda, Clinton said that he wanted the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into Gingrich’s conduct to end quickly.

But there was no sign that GOP leaders were moved to give the president a long-term break from either criticism or investigation.

Clinton’s interest in his place in history has been abiding. The president reads U.S. history and biography voraciously and has drawn parallels often with earlier presidents.

When he came to office as the youngest president ever elected, his rhetoric and his image sometimes echoed John F. Kennedy. When he lost both houses of Congress in a disastrous midterm election that was at least partly a public verdict on his presidency, he turned to Harry S. Truman, who staged the greatest comeback in modern political history in the election of 1948.

And one of his lines on Monday--his declaration that government is neither the problem nor the solution to most of the nation’s woes--was a direct rebuttal across the span of 16 years to Ronald Reagan, who in his first inaugural address said that government “isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.”

For much of the last election year, as Clinton burnished his theme of bringing the nation into a new century, he searched history for models--and came up with Jefferson, who boldly doubled the size of the young nation with the Louisiana Purchase, and Theodore Roosevelt, who won passage of many of the nation’s first industrial regulatory laws.

This moment is similar, Clinton argued, because the nation is undergoing a wave of fundamental change, just as it did under Jefferson and Roosevelt.

Some historians grant Clinton that point, but wonder whether remaking the federal government to live within a balanced budget will stack up as a feat equal to those of the two predecessors.

“The problem,” noted historian Michael Beschloss, “is a president is bound by the era in which he serves.”

Clinton has few illusions on that point.

“It is no good complaining or feeling sorry for yourself if history requires you to play a role that is not entirely the one you thought out,” he said in an interview last year.

* A WEALTH OF PARTIES

Many inaugural celebrations mixed pleasure, business. A12

* $44-MILLION TAB

U.S. spent $1 million a word to give Clinton the oath. A12

* INAUGURAL TEXT, PHOTOS: A10-A13

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Timing Clinton’s Speeches

Minutes: Date/Event

33: July 20, 1988

Nominating speech for Democratic presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis

53: July 16, 1992

Acceptance speech for Democratic nomination