THE LAST ACTION HERO

By ERIC POOLEY/WASHINGTON

When Bill Clinton stood in the Rose Garden last week and announced a $5 billion plan to help cities and states fix up their crumbling schools, it represented a big change of pace for him. Not because the initiative promises to help American children--with the election fast approaching, Clinton does that all the time--but because it has to get through Congress before it becomes law. The President didn't mention that, perhaps because he's out of practice asking Capitol Hill for crumbs. He's busy trying to turn his presidency into a solo act--running for re-election by Executive decree.

It is breaking the hearts of Republicans. Some of Clinton's proposals, from welfare reform to cleaning up TV, were lifted from the enemy camp, but most are being promoted through an array of presidential directives that cut the G.O.P. out of the picture. Says presidential historian Michael Beschloss: "Clinton is the first President to use Executive action the way a painter uses a brush: to slowly, carefully fill in parts of his own public image."

The portrait being offered is stern but loving. It's of Clinton's cracking down on truants, on hoodlums who sell guns to kids, on deadbeat dads and teenage welfare moms while embracing a larger group of pro-family initiatives. In just the past two months he has been waging campaigns against teenage smoking and drug use while promoting plans to make meat safer, put more educational programming on television, give working parents more flextime and offer tax credits to pay for college tuition. Of these proposals, only the last two require action from Congress.

The rest are often described in news accounts as "executive orders," a splendidly take-charge term that calls to mind great moments in presidential history: Truman integrating the Army in 1948, Eisenhower dispatching troops to desegregate a Little Rock, Arkansas, high school in 1957. But in fact, very few of Clinton's recent actions are formal Executive Orders. He doesn't issue them any more frequently than George Bush did. Instead, Clinton's tools of choice are known as "presidential directives" and "memoranda to agencies." A President's way of telling his bureaucrats what to do, they carry less weight than Executive Orders tend to. (The White House doesn't mind it, however, when the papers use the more stirring term.) At other times the President simply chooses to announce (and thus grab credit for) new policies coming out of his agencies, such as the Agriculture Department's new rules for meat inspection, which were served up amid fireworks and grill smoke on the Fourth of July weekend. Often he relies on simple exhortations--to local government, network executives or tobacco companies--with no particular executive fiat lending them force. "Doesn't matter," says a Clinton adviser with obvious satisfaction. "After a while they all blend together. Bottom line: the President's signing important papers at his desk." So what if the papers merely instruct the Education Secretary to stock up on stamps and mail out truancy-prevention manuals to school districts? The image is first-rate.

In fact, the policy has been a huge hit with middle-class married couples who Clinton pollsters Mark Penn and Douglas Schoen believe will decide the fall election. Where reporters see cute brushwork, many voters apparently see the portrait of an activist President leading a crusade to save the American family. "You're a parent," says press secretary Mike McCurry, leaning into the pitch. "Between the time you get up and the time you go to sleep, this President has made your job just a little easier. It ain't the New Deal, but it ain't bad." Most important, striking this pose has had a bracing effect on Clinton's job performance. As longtime strategist Dick Morris once explained to Clinton biographer David Maraniss, Clinton needs to be engaged in "some important, valiant fight for the good of the world to lend coherence and structure to his life."

Morris has helped develop the strategy into a bedrock of Clinton's re-election effort, but it originated much earlier. Even before the midterm election in 1994 Clinton was using presidential directives to expand "family-friendly work arrangements" and implement "safe and gun-free schools." After the Republicans seized control of Congress--and Clinton was forced to argue for his own relevancy--he began making even more frequent use of Executive action. By last summer Chief of Staff Leon Panetta was asking Clinton's Cabinet chiefs for policy ideas that didn't need congressional approval.

But it was Morris who hurled the strategy into orbit, coming up with sometimes brilliant, sometimes wild ideas for Executive actions. White House aides say he his forever punching the little keypad on his handheld computer datebook, spitting out so many notions that the law of averages demands that some be outlandish. He was pushing hard for an Executive Order requiring all 50 states to adopt a two-year time limit on welfare--until he found out it was illegal. Now, sources say, Clinton may impose new welfare-to-work requirements on the states if the reform bill now before Congress stalls. Other Executive actions in the works: new ways to protect the environment, and still more commotion on TV violence and deadbeat dads. If the White House pen-in-hand picture is tiring you already, just wait: Clinton will be signing presidential directives right up until Election Day.