THE SECOND TIME AROUND, SIMPLE IS BEAUTIFUL

By MICHAEL DUFFY

An Inaugural, like any good overture, prefigures the rest of the show. Which is why the Clintons are being very careful this time. Four years ago, new to town and a little stagestruck, they sprawled fireworks and Warren Beatty over four days, a coronation paid for by the FORTUNE 500 and capped by 30-year-old White House aides standing in line to pose in their evening wear for Vanity Fair. When the Clintons' populist presumptions outpaced their skill at scheduling, they left out in the cold hundreds of well-wishers who had been promised a chance to shake the new President's hand. The snafu prompted Hillary Clinton to whisper to her husband on network television, "We just screwed all these people."

This year, older and wiser and practiced in humility, Clinton is toning it down. He promised only modest enterprises and gestures during the campaign, and so the 53rd Inaugural is built to scale: smaller, shorter, cheaper, spread over three days, with eight tents on the Mall instead of 65. Gone is Barbra Streisand, who decided to attend a movie awards ceremony instead. At the "vital center" of this Inaugural are such artists as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and country music singer Trisha Yearwood. Cymbals and symbols have been muted: there will be no walk across the Memorial Bridge arm in arm with hundreds of schoolchildren while bells ring from coast to coast. This time the Clintons rejected a suggestion that five-year-olds build a Tinker Toy bridge to the 21st century--too frivolous, they decided. The President spent hours sweating the details of Monday morning's national prayer service and handpicked Arkansas poet Miller Williams to muse at the swearing in. "The President and First Lady wanted it to be less of a megillah," said a West Wing official. "Simple" and "elegant" are the terms Clinton officials want applied to it when it's over.

And "clean." Sensitive about having taken cash from just about anyone during the campaign, Clinton banned the corporate contributions, interest-free loans and in-kind donations that normally underwrite such a celebration. Continental Airlines won't provide free seats to celebrities. General Motors will not provide 300 cars, free of charge, for the parade, and Ralston Purina will not hay and water the hundreds of horses that usually turn the Mall into an urban Ponderosa for a few days. "They are doing the Caesar's wife Inaugural," said insurance lobbyist Michael Lewan, a Democrat.

None of this ethical purity would have been possible without a $9 million surplus left over from the 1993 Inaugural. The rest of the $30 million cost will be offset by the sale of tickets and trinkets, like the $39.95 bronze medallion, featuring likenesses of Clinton and Al Gore, available from the qvc shopping channel. (During one brief three-hour segment, buyers phoned in orders for the commemorative item totaling, on average, $10,800 a minute.) But home shopping is at least democratic; the sale of tickets to special Inaugural events is not. Democratic donors won the right to purchase the best seats at the parade, the balls and the gala based in part on how much they gave. Each invitation came with a special eight-digit code that enforced the carefully prearranged pecking order. Who got the richest invitations? Those donors who have, as spokesman David Seldin put it, "shown an ability to spend."

Those who lack that ability can venture instead to the Mall, where the Inaugural Committee has arranged two days of free music, entertainment and food under the eight big tents. At the Technology Playground, visitors can contribute to the Inaugural Webumentary and send E-mail to the Clintons and Gores on 100 computer terminals; Elmo and Bill Nye "the Science Guy" will perform for kids at the Millennium Schoolhouse nearby, and over at the American Journey Pavilion, up to 3,000 Americans can listen to others tell the story of their personal journeys, a kind of civics class for the New Age. Administration officials roll their eyes a little when asked about this, but the basic lesson is a corollary to the one Clinton took away from his first term: government can't solve all of America's problems. Citizens must look to themselves and each other for solutions.

Clinton long ago said the era of Big Government is over; perhaps the same is true of big Inaugurals. But it may be that Clinton has learned something else: lowering expectations is a powerful way to set the stage for exceeding them. If the first Inaugural was a grandiose affair that presaged only modest achievements, perhaps only a modest beginning can prefigure something truly grand.

--With reporting by Viveca Novak/Washington

With reporting by Viveca Novak/Washington