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THROUGH THE CAMERA LENS, BILL CLINTON LOOKED relieved to be wrestling with a problem as relatively manageable as, say, the economy. Having strayed into nasty thickets like gays in the military and the nanny gap, he needed to steer his message back to deficit cutting. To do so, Clinton used his campaign- tested technique of taking questions from a TV audience, which allowed him to try to prepare Americans for the "shared sacrifice" of the economic plan he will unveil this week.

But first Clinton made some sacrifices close to home. On Tuesday he proposed to reduce the White House staff by 350 people, which he said would satisfy his campaign promise of a 25% cut. By far the largest reduction will come at the Office of National Drug Control Policy, home of the White House drug czar, where 121 jobs will be lost. To discourage the impression that he was going soft on narcotics, Clinton elevated the post to Cabinet level.

On Wednesday the President signed three Executive Orders that are designed to save more than $9 billion in four years. One will cut the 3.1 million civilian federal job force by 100,000, mostly through attrition, while another abolishes at least a third of the 700 advisory boards and commissions (example: the Board of Tea Experts). A third directs the Cabinet and federal agencies to reduce administrative costs 14%.

Clinton used his appearance before 60 people in a suburban Detroit television studio to dampen expectations of a middle-class tax cut. Meeting with business executives the next day, he floated the idea of a hike in the top corporate tax rate, currently 34%, as well as a broad-based energy tax. But the President backed away from hints that he might seek a one-year freeze on Social Security cost of living adjustments, after trial balloons to that effect caused a predictable uproar among the elderly and their friends in Congress. Clinton called on Americans to hear the "alarm bells in the night" about the economy. But as the COLA episode suggested, some Americans are bound to find cause for alarm in his solutions. (See Cover Stories beginning on page 24.)