NO GUTS, NO GLORY

By ERIC POOLEY

There's a whole lot of soaring going on at the White House these days. To get ready for next week's Inaugural Address, Bill Clinton has been flight-testing an array of lofty themes and presidential postures designed to make him look good in the history books. In his recent speeches, Clinton has styled himself as the National Unifier, a Reconciliation Man who will show America the way to the "vital center," where good things get done. Aides say he sees himself as T.R. with a drawl: just as Teddy Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to lead the country through a perilous transformation from agrarian to industrial society, so Clinton would use his to lead America from the industrial to the information age. And though Clinton and Congress will surely agree this year on a plan for fiscal balance by 2002, upon such quotidian concerns, the White House says, the President's legacy simply does not depend. "Clinton's chapter in the history books will not be 'Here's the guy who balanced the budget,'" says press secretary Mike McCurry. "It will be 'Here's the guy who awakened America to the leadership possibilities of the 21st century.'"

And how will Clinton go about doing this? "There will be a legacy war room," jokes a senior official who can't resist sending up the Permanent Campaigner's assault on history. "We'll bring in [presidential scholar] Michael Beschloss to spin the historians. If any of them has a question, [National Economic Council chief] Gene Sperling will fax him an answer. [Senior adviser] Rahm Emanuel has checked out every biography of a two-term President--and we're going to be bad-mouthing all of them. With the money left over from the '96 campaign, we'll run ads wherever there's a presidential library. We don't have to finish first, just ahead of Eisenhower."

Here's hoping Clinton returns to earth. All the visionary talk in the world won't count for much unless he nails it down with some real leadership, the kind that springs not from rhetoric but from old-fashioned deal making and what Teddy Roosevelt called the willingness "to dare mighty things." Clinton last week expressed the view that "great Presidents don't do great things. Great Presidents get a lot of other people to do great things." This is a tautology, since getting others to do great things--persuading Congress to pass campaign-finance reform, say--is itself doing something great. It is also just plain wrong. The most effective Presidents, as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote last month in the New York Times Magazine, put their own careers on the line. They "all took risks in pursuit of their ideals. They all provoked intense controversy. They all, except Washington, divided the nation before reuniting it on a new level of understanding."

So to govern as he ran, as a centrist who can help create tools to improve American lives, Clinton will have to stop talking about compromise and begin forging it. He could begin by staking out bold positions on the thorniest problems he can actually do something about: reforming Medicare and Social Security, the middle-class entitlement monsters that will consume the budget if left unchecked. According to research conducted for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council by Clinton pollster Mark Penn, "more than 85% of voters would favor Clinton's making Social Security and Medicare reform his second-term priority.'' Clinton shows no sign of doing so, because he believes that taking a position merely invites partisan attack. Sniffs one of his advisers: "'Bold' is a journalist's trap." What would T.R. say about that?

Clinton's risk-averse strategy was on display last week as his approach to Medicare reform began to emerge. To an urgent problem--the hospital trust fund is due to go bankrupt in about five years--he is expected to offer a nonsolution: the accounting gimmick of moving home-health-care costs out of the hospital fund and paying for them with general revenues.

The gimmick is the key to Clinton's slick Medicare math. It's true: he will offer somewhere between the $124 billion in Medicare reductions he proposed in 1995 and the $168 billion, one of several figures the Republicans suggested. But the first $80 billion to $100 billion in cuts are relatively easy to find, says Medicare trustee Marilyn Moon. They come from shaving Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals and reducing the fees paid to managed-care companies for the 5 million Medicare patients who have enrolled in those plans. (These cuts are made possible because the market itself has begun to rein in health-care costs.) After that, the options start to draw blood: they include means testing, hiking premiums and capping payments. Instead of considering these fixes--and making a real attempt to avert the looming crisis--Clinton will resort to his trick of moving money around. Republicans will howl, but the White House isn't terribly worried about that. The math is too complicated to get people's attention, Clinton aides say, and anyway the Republicans are too damaged on the Medicare issue to make the case after being hammered last year by Clinton's relentless "Mediscare" campaign. Besides, his advisers argue, adding five years to the life of Medicare is accomplishment enough, since the program has for decades teetered on the brink of insolvency. While that's a bit like saying, "I can bounce checks because my daddy did," it's the best Clinton--and Congress--seem willing to do. So, instead of taking a position, the President will appoint a bipartisan commission. Bully!

Commissions only get you so far. A reminder of that came last week, when the Advisory Council on Social Security, after 21/2 years of study and deliberation, issued its final report on repairing the system. Clinton formed the panel to get some political cover for the tough choices that must be made to keep Social Security alive in the next century. But the council gave Clinton no cover. Its members deadlocked over three proposals for extending the life of the system: all three call for investing Social Security money in the stock market (instead of the lower-yielding but more secure Treasury bills used now), but they differ sharply on how much to invest and who should control investment decisions. Even so, the report gave Clinton a chance to lead: Does he favor a market solution, or does he want to throw his weight behind means testing as a way to avoid so much as limited privatization of this venerable federal program?

The President wouldn't say. He sent McCurry out with a clarification: Clinton "believes that there are a number of ideas that have surfaced as part of this debate," McCurry explained, "and certainly in the report of the advisory council itself, that merit further discussion. He is not wedded to any of the suggestions made by any of the separate groups of members of the council itself but agrees that many of these ideas will have to be discussed further." Teddy Roosevelt had a term for sentences like that. He called them "weasel words."

The White House argues that it's too early to commit to any specific plan--or even to a general direction. "We want people to read in their history books in 2052 that Clinton preserved the Social Security system," says McCurry. "But the sky isn't falling. The program runs a surplus well into the next century." That's only half the story. If a solution isn't imposed before this century runs out, the numbers get so out of whack that they can't easily be put right again: waiting just five years to impose a 2.6% payroll-tax increase, the Concord Coalition says, would add $1 trillion to the program's costs over the next 70 years. And for political reasons, this year may be Clinton's only chance. "With a second-term President, the fifth year is the only time he has an opportunity to get anything done," says Brookings Institution scholar Stephen Hess. After that, lame-duck status sets in. Congress will spend 1998 fighting out the mid-term elections, and in 1999 the presidential race begins in earnest.

The preliminaries have already begun. In meetings with incoming White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, House minority leader Richard Gephardt--Al Gore's likeliest rival for the 2000 nomination--has warned the Administration not to go beyond the 1995 Democratic proposal of $124 billion in Medicare cuts. To distinguish himself from Gore, Gephardt knows he has to play to Democratic loyalists like seniors and union members. "I'm not going to be for something that slashes Medicare," he says. Though some form of means testing is all but inevitable, trustees say, Gephardt won't hear of it, and Clinton isn't ready to discuss it. If he did, Gephardt would probably join the opposition, placing himself on the side of the 34 million-member American Association of Retired People against Clinton, Gore and boomers, who wonder who will pay for their retirement. Never mind that getting the ugly necessary fight out of the way early--and reuniting the country long before Gore and Gephardt start tramping around Iowa--could be Gore's best strategy.

Gephardt has also warned the Administration against getting budget relief by revising down the Consumer Price Index, which is apparently giving retirees cost of living increases about 30% higher than the rate of inflation. Bringing the CPI even halfway into line with economic reality would shave billions off the deficit. But Clinton and Gore don't need the savings to balance the budget this year, so they'll consider a CPI adjustment down the road.

Clinton and his new team--a competent, bland bunch of centrists--don't want to stake the success of the second term on perilous negotiations with Congress. The lesson of the still unfolding Gingrich scandal, White House aides say, is how much control members of the G.O.P. leadership still exert over the rank and file. In an intensely partisan atmosphere, collecting votes from G.O.P. moderates is going to be tough for Clinton. So he is choosing to forge ahead with the strategy that worked so well for him last year. Its essence: avoid grand legislative schemes and bypass Congress altogether in favor of low-cost proposals, Executive actions and speeches that highlight local initiatives, especially on welfare reform and education, which Clinton sees as his best shot for a lasting legacy. "Most of this work isn't done in Congress," says McCurry. In the coming weeks, Clinton will travel to state capitals to exhort legislatures to beef up educational standards and help put welfare recipients to work.

These are essential issues. But as even some White House aides admit, Clinton's traveling show is most effective when he's getting things done back in Washington--and most of that work is done in Congress. "He obviously has to go through Congress to get things done," says Leon Panetta, the outgoing chief of staff. "But he can't be seen as tied to its failings. He has to use the bully pulpit effectively and confront Congress effectively." As other aides point out, legislative action is required for 80% of the items on Clinton's to-do list: offering health-care coverage to every American child, financing the first two years of college through Hope Scholarships, and extending the Brady Bill to wife beaters and the Family and Medical Leave Law to people who take time off for parent-teacher meetings. Clinton has a good shot at getting these items, since the G.O.P. wants desperately to close the gender gap. But other parts of his agenda--rolling back $15 billion in welfare cuts and passing campaign-finance reform--are less likely.

In the case of campaign-finance reform, Clinton may not care; Gore's need to raise money for 2000 clashes with Clinton's desire to rehabilitate himself on the issue. Since Clinton knows that Senator Mitch McConnell and other Republicans will throw themselves in the way of any reform bill, Clinton can push for it without having to concern himself that it will actually happen. To prove he's serious about the matter, Clinton would have to go beyond a legislative proposal and orchestrate an immense grass-roots campaign, a full-throated national roar so long and loud that reform becomes inevitable. But a President known for renting out the Lincoln Bedroom may lack the stature to make that happen.

Clinton's best hope for pushing through legislation is to build a center-right coalition of Democrats and Republicans, though the move risks splitting open his party and giving Gephardt valuable ammunition for a primary run against Gore. House Republican Conference chairman John Boehner foresees multiple coalitions, with swing votes coming from different members on each issue: the balanced budget, a tax cut and stopgap Medicare reform. "The agenda they're talking about is the agenda we're talking about," he says. "It's likely it will become law." Clinton and Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader, have been talking regularly. Lott was in minority leader Tom Daschle's office last week when Lott's pager went off, telling him that Clinton was calling. The Mississippian hustled back to his office to take the call in private. When he explained the delay to Clinton, the President laughed. "Well," Clinton said, "tell Tom I called to tell you I'm switching parties." That would be one way to lock in a legacy.

--Reported by James Carney, John F. Dickerson and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington

With reporting by JAMES CARNEY, JOHN F. DICKERSON AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WASHINGTON