Clinton

Reporting from Washington — Most of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters in California say they expect that come November, Hillary Clinton will be elected president — and, by and large, they’re OK with that.

While both Democratic camps prepare for a final battle in the state’s June 7 primary, the latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times statewide poll found that just over half of Sanders’ supporters said they expected Clinton to be the next president. About a third of Sanders’ backers said they expected the Vermont senator to emerge the winner, and 12% said they thought Donald Trump would prevail.

Close to 8 in 10 Sanders supporters said in the survey that they would vote for Clinton in a race against Trump, although many said they would do so reluctantly.

Those findings show the reality underlying the still-heated rhetoric of the Democratic primaries: By contrast with the civil war that divides Republicans, Democrats in the country’s largest state have begun to coalesce behind their front-runner.

In the primary race, Clinton holds a modest lead over Sanders, 45% to 37%, among all Democrats and independent voters eligible to vote. Her lead is slightly larger, 47% to 36%, among those most likely to vote. Either way, that’s a significant problem for Sanders.

The poll was conducted before Sanders’ sweep of three Western states — Alaska, Hawaii and Washington — on Saturday, but those victories don’t change the electoral math much. Sanders would need not just a win in California, but something close to a landslide to overcome Clinton’s large lead in delegates before the party’s nominating convention in July.

Something else hasn’t changed: If there’s one blemish in the picture for Clinton, it’s the persistently high percentage of voters who have an unfavorable image of her, 45% in the new poll.

Clinton’s image in heavily Democratic California is more positive than it is in more Republican parts of the country; 52% of the state’s surveyed voters see her favorably. She fares far better than Trump, her most likely opponent in November, who is viewed negatively by almost three-fourths of California voters.

A Democratic voter at a Washington state caucus on Saturday. In the California primary race, Hillary Clinton holds a modest lead over Bernie Sanders, 45% to 37%, among all Democrats and independent voters eligible to vote.

(Elaine Thompson / Associated Press)

But her image with the public lags significantly behind other leading Democrats. That includes President Obama, whose popularity has risen, both statewide and nationally, in recent weeks. He is now seen favorably by 65% of the state’s voters, the highest level since early in his tenure. Gov. Jerry Brown is viewed favorably by 57%. Both men are viewed negatively by about one-third of voters.

The large share of voters who have a negative view of her does not put Clinton in danger of losing California in a general election: She would defeat any of the Republican candidates handily in the state, which has formed the cornerstone of Democratic victories nationally ever since her husband’s win in 1992. Against Trump, in particular, Clinton would win overwhelmingly, the poll indicated, carrying the state 59% to 28%.

But the negative impressions of so many Californians point toward the deeper problem she faces in the country and also to the likely tone of the fall campaign. A Clinton-Trump race, more than any other in recent decades, would feature two candidates who would start the campaign with large parts of the electorate deeply disenchanted with them. Given that, each side is likely to try to focus voters’ attention on the other’s flaws.

“Clinton’s challenge is not one of persuasion, it’s one of motivation,” said Dan Schnur, director of USC’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics. “She’s not going to get Sanders supporters to fall in love with her,” he added, but “the other way to motivate your base is to frighten them about the alternative. Against Donald Trump, that should be very doable.”

That’s certainly the case for Gretta Whalen, a 32-year-old freelance writer and communications consultant from Los Angeles, who leans toward Sanders. Clinton, she said, “has been around for so long, and we know so much about her, and not all of it is positive.” Sanders, by contrast, seems attractive, and his ideas feel new, even if “some of them are very pie in the sky and would be very difficult to get the rest of the country on board with.”

But, she added, as she paused from feeding her newborn son, the contest is different “now that we’re looking at a likely race against Donald Trump.” She and her friends, most of whom back Sanders, “are all so shocked that we’re in this place where Donald Trump is a serious contender for president,” she said. Compared with past elections, this campaign “feels a little more surreal.”

“I was much more excited about Bernie” earlier in the campaign season, she added. “We love him as a candidate. We also recognize that he’s not the most realistic winner.”

Just under 1 in 4 voters in the state have a negative image of both of the likely contestants. That group would hold its nose and side with Clinton over Trump, 38% to 23%, with a significant share of them saying they would not vote at all, the poll found.

Sercan Ersoy, a 33-year-old substitute teacher in Oakland, has much more negative feelings about Clinton than does Whalen. A former member of the Green Party who changed his registration in order to vote for Sanders in the primary, Ersoy feels Clinton is “too much of a war hawk” in addition to having too many ties to Wall Street. “I don’t want to vote for her,” he said.

But “if you ask me in late October,” he added, “and there’s a real possibility of a President Trump, I might say, ‘OK. I’ll vote for Hillary.’”

This USC/L.A. Times poll was conducted March 16-23 by telephone, both cellphone and landline, among 1,503 registered voters in California, including 832 Democrats and non-party voters eligible to take part in the June primary. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points for the full sample and 3.7 percentage points for the Democratic primary sample. It was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a Democratic polling firm, and the Republican company American Viewpoint.

The poll found the race between Clinton and Sanders dividing along lines that have become familiar during nearly two months of primaries: Sanders overwhelmingly wins voters younger than 30; Clinton does better with older voters. She leads among women by 11 percentage points, among men by 5 points.

Clinton leads narrowly among white voters but has a much larger edge among blacks and Latinos. In a surprise, given her family’s long-standing popularity with Asian voters, Clinton appears to be trailing Sanders with that group, although his edge, 43% to 35%, is within the poll’s margin of error for such a subgroup.

Clinton’s lead among minority voters is “much more muted” than her edge in previous contests in Texas and across the South, said pollster Anna Greenberg. That’s largely a result of a generational divide, with Sanders leading among younger Latinos, much as he does among young white voters. The other minority groups are too small to allow a detailed breakdown by age.

The other significant division in the primary is by party. California’s Democratic primary is open to registered Democrats as well as voters who decline to state a party. Clinton leads Sanders by 14 percentage points among registered Democrats; Sanders leads by 9 percentage points among the nonpartisan voters — again a pattern seen repeatedly in other states.

Among Sanders voters, 80% polled said they would vote for Clinton in November, although the share saying they would do so “reluctantly,” 45%, outnumbers those who would do so “enthusiastically,” 35%.

About 1 in 8 Democratic primary voters surveyed said they would refuse to vote for Clinton if she is the nominee. That’s half the level of rejection that Trump faces among Republican primary voters.

Among the Democratic primary voters most resistant to backing her in the fall are white men 65 and older, according to the poll. By contrast, only 4% of people who identified themselves as students said they would refuse to vote for Clinton — another indication that Sanders’ core supporters are unlikely to reject her candidacy.

By 72% to 21%, Democratic primary voters said in the survey that they are excited about the prospect of voting for the first female president.

Sanders has centered his campaign around the belief that the U.S. economy is unfairly rigged by Wall Street and big corporations. Not surprisingly, a large majority of his voters share that view.

The poll asked people if they thought that in today’s economy “everyone has a fair chance to get ahead in the long run if they work hard” or if “it’s mainly just a few people at the top who have a chance to get ahead.” By more than 2 to 1, Sanders’ voters said that only those at the top could get ahead.

Clinton’s supporters were more evenly divided, with 52% saying that everyone had a fair chance and 42% saying that only those at the top could get ahead. That reflected, in part, the feelings of Latinos, who are more likely than other Americans to say that hard work still pays off in the long run.

Those who backed Clinton were also more likely than Sanders’ backers to say that “when it comes to good jobs for American workers, our best years are ahead of us.” More than 6 in 10 of Clinton’s voters agreed with that statement, compared with just under half of Sanders’.

Neither group of Democratic voters was as pessimistic as Trump’s supporters, however. A majority of them said that when it comes to good jobs, “America’s best years are behind us.”

david.lauter@latimes.com

For more on Campaign 2016, follow @davidlauter

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Trump leads Republican primary field

California’s June primary just became crucial in the race for the White House

Full coverage of the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll

Full poll results and detailed crosstabs

Updates on California politics

Live coverage from the campaign trail

CHICAGO — President-elect Bill Clinton used a community college in Chicago Monday to try out an updated economic message that Americans will be hearing frequently from him in the weeks to come: We’re not out of the woods yet.

“When you read that things are getting better with the unemployment rate, inflation rate, housing starts, things of that kind, that’s a good thing,” Clinton told an audience of some 150 students at Wilbur Wright Community College on this city’s northwest side. But, he warned, those improvements are merely part of the short-term business cycle.

“Underneath that,” he said, are “20 years of problems.”

“We may or may not be coming out of the recession,” Clinton said. “There are some good indicators that we are, but the long-term problems are there and that is what I have to address.”

Clinton’s statements reflect a basic dilemma that he faces: He relied on a bad economy to help him get elected. And while he would like to see improvements, he must rely on continued worries about the economy to get his programs enacted over what is certain to be fierce opposition from vested interests in Washington. In addition, of course, having defeated President Bush on the issue of the economy, Clinton would like to be able to say that economic improvements occurred on his watch, not on that of his predecessor.

With the economy showing steady signs of improvement, those factors have impelled Clinton and his aides to try with increasing diligence to focus public attention on the long-term trends of economic stagnation–and his long-term agenda to change them–rather than on talk of a short-term stimulus to help an economy that may well be moving out of recession on its own.

The emphasis on the long-term agenda will be central to the economic conference that Clinton plans to convene in Little Rock next week. Aides envision the conclave in large part as a tutorial to explain to Americans why the country needs Clinton’s agenda of raising taxes, revamping the health care system, and increasing spending on education, training and new technologies to reduce the deficit.

In answering questions from the students, Clinton provided the most detailed view since the election of how he intends to form a coherent agenda out of the many promises he made in the campaign.

Repeatedly he referred to two key proposals: His plan for a national service trust fund to let Americans finance their educations by borrowing money and paying part of it back through public-service work, and his plans to reform the nation’s health care system.

Changing the health care system is the one thing that he would do “if I could wave a magic wand,” Clinton said, reminding the students of the effect that rising health care costs have had on the ability of American companies to compete.

At the same time, the session with the students showcased a shift in Clinton’s rhetoric from the language of the campaign to the sterner realities of governing. During the campaign, Clinton struggled against his natural tendency to give four-part answers to all questions. Now he appears to have given up that fight.

And repeatedly, as the students asked Clinton for more federal money for program after program, the President-elect, mindful of the massive deficit he soon will inherit, responded with a polite version of “no.”

One woman asked if he would provide special incentives for minority students to attend college. No, Clinton said, the goal should be to make loans and scholarship funds broadly available and then recruit in minority communities. A nursing student asked about special incentives to encourage people to pursue nursing careers. No, Clinton replied, noting that nursing salaries have gone up because of shortages.

Still another noted that some of the classes he wanted to take have been canceled due to a lack of funds. Could the federal government help? he asked. “The federal government, with the huge deficits we are now facing, does not have the capacity to take over substantial funding of the community college system,” Clinton replied.

Despite that, Clinton seemed to win the student’s enthusiasm simply by having shown up.

“He could have just gone to Princeton or Yale and spoken in their auditorium. Instead he came here,” said Erika Marie Dimitrijevic, a 35-year-old mother who attends an ultrasound training program at the school. “I think he wants to get closer to the people.”

Dimitrijevic is in many ways representative of the school, whose average student is a 31-year-old woman. Roughly 50% of the 14,000 Wright students are white, while 20% are black and 30% are Latino. About 15% are women who head households.

The President-elect also used the occasion to score some points with the area’s political leaders, who were crucial in his battles to win his party’s nomination and to defeat President Bush. They will be equally important to whatever success he manages in the next four years. Clinton took time to meet with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, along with Daley’s brother William, who has been touted in Chicago as a potential secretary of transportation in the Clinton Administration.

And in speaking to the students, Clinton made a point of praising their local congressman, Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, whose panel will have jurisdiction over much of Clinton’s economic and health care proposals and whose help Clinton has courted assiduously in recent weeks.

If he succeeds in changing the nation’s health care system, “it will be in no small measure because of Danny Rostenkowski’s leadership,” he said.

Later in the day, Clinton arrived in Washington and courted members of Congress by attending a reception for newly elected freshmen.

He will spend most of today on Capitol Hill, meeting with freshmen congressmen again as well as with congressional committee chairmen.

Clinton’s attempts to woo members of Congress, both the powerful and the new, are in sharp–and deliberate–contrast to the approach of Jimmy Carter, the last Democratic President, whose relations with Capitol Hill were tense and troubled. Clinton and his aides, by contrast, have taken every possible opportunity to try to bring members of Congress onto his team, an effort which is likely to include appointing several to his Cabinet.

The first of those expected Cabinet appointments are expected later this week.

As Clinton left the White House guest quarters at Blair House Monday night, en route to a party at the home of Washington Post Co. Chairwoman Katharine Graham, he was accompanied by several members of his transition team and Lawrence Summers, a World Bank economist, who is considered a possible choice for economic security adviser.

After a scheduled return to Little Rock tonight, Clinton likely will resign from the post of governor Wednesday, closing a 12-year chapter of his life. He is also expected to release new ethics guidelines for his Administration.

Researcher Tracy Shryer in Chicago contributed to this story.

WASHINGTON — President Clinton consulted congressional leaders Wednesday on his policy toward Bosnia but continued to avoid a firm commitment to seek congressional approval before deciding to send American forces there.

The 1973 War Powers Act requires the President to notify Congress in most cases before sending troops into areas of potential hostilities and requires that the troops be withdrawn within 60 days if Congress does not authorize their presence.

The law was enacted over President Richard Nixon’s veto. Each successive Administration has argued that it represents an unconstitutional infringement on the President’s powers as commander in chief.

During the last 12 years of Republican administrations, Democrats in Congress have made a major issue of support for the War Powers Act. That puts Clinton and his aides in a potentially difficult situation, which they have tried to avoid by evading questions about precisely where they stand.

Clinton continued that approach Wednesday. “Ask my lawyer, I don’t play lawyer,” he said when asked at a White House photo session whether he believes the law is constitutional. “I think it’s worked reasonably well.”

Later, White House Communications Director George Stephanopoulos said: “The President is reviewing the War Powers Act at this time. That is under review by the National Security Council and the counsel’s office.”

White House aides have fallen back on carefully worded pledges to consult with Congress in a manner that is “consistent with” the war powers law but not necessarily “pursuant to” it. Once Clinton decides on a course of action, he “will go to the Congress if it is required,” Stephanopoulos said.

President George Bush followed a somewhat similar path before the Persian Gulf War. Bush argued that he did not need congressional authorization before sending troops to the Gulf but urged Congress to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq before the actual war began. Bush insisted, however, that he had the power to go ahead with the attack if Congress voted against him.

Clinton’s less clear-cut position appears to be acceptable to congressional leaders.

Although members of Congress have often touted the War Powers Act as an important safeguard against unbridled executive power, few over the last 20 years have relished the prospect of using it.

One indication of the weakness of the law came in the House on Wednesday when it finally got around to approving a resolution authorizing the sending of U.S. troops to Somalia. The authorization came five months after the troops were dispatched and the day after U.S. forces turned over control of the relief effort to the United Nations.

At a ceremony at the White House to honor troops returning from the African nation, Clinton linked their experiences with the events that may soon unfold in the former Yugoslav republics.

“Your successful return reminds us that other missions lie ahead for our nation,” he said. “You have proved again that our involvement in multilateral operations need not be open-ended or ill-defined, that we can go abroad and accomplish some distinct objectives and then come home again when the mission is accomplished.”

At a later White House ceremony, where he talked about the importance of rapid action on health care reform, Clinton defended his Administration against the charge that monitoring developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina has interfered with his other activities and that it has tried to do too many things at once.

“One of the most challenging things we have to do in this city at this time is to break a mind-set that we have one problem at a time and we’ll get on it and we’ll only think about that,” Clinton said.

WASHINGTON — If agony in high places is any measure, the war in Bosnia is already President Clinton’s Vietnam.

The President says that it is the issue he cannot stop worrying about at the end of the day; he takes the problem home at night and hashes it over with his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The tragedy in the Balkans is “not only heartbreaking,” he said this week, “it’s infuriating.”

And Secretary of State Warren Christopher, a notably unemotional man, throws up his hands at the subject. “This is a problem from hell,” he declared. On Wednesday, Christopher met privately with author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to discuss the issue’s moral implications.

Clinton’s advisers have huddled for hours over the last three weeks to thresh out options for diplomatic and military action–and still have not reached a decision.

Like Lyndon B. Johnson, whose presidency was wrecked by the American military intervention in Vietnam, Bill Clinton faces an agonizing conflict between his international ideals and the potential cost of achieving them.

Beginning in last year’s presidential campaign, Clinton declared that the United States had a responsibility to stop the onslaught of Bosnia’s Serbs against the republic’s other ethnic groups, the Croats and Muslims. “We have an interest in standing up against the principle of ‘ethnic cleansing’ . . ,” he said earlier this month. “If you look at the other places where this could play itself out in other parts of the world, this is not just about Bosnia.”

Yet the President’s attempt to stop the Serbs through diplomatic pressure has failed. So Clinton, only three months into his presidency, faces an unpalatable choice between escalation and retreat–that, and a swelling national debate over the limits of American responsibility.

Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, Americans have argued over every potential military intervention in terms of Vietnam, whether the battlefield was Lebanon, Central America, the Balkans and even Desert Storm in its early days. Is Bosnia another quagmire, a war America should not enter because its price in blood will inevitably run too high? Or is it, as Christopher has asked, another Holocaust–a tragedy America must stop because the cost in innocent lives–and to America’s moral conscience–is too great to ignore?

All historical analogies are inexact, of course. But Vietnam and the Holocaust are the twin phantoms that haunt the Clinton Administration’s debate over what to do in the Bosnian highlands.

Last week, at the opening of Washington’s new Holocaust Memorial Museum, Clinton found himself confronted directly with one of history’s unwelcome ghosts, when Wiesel appealed to him to stop the war in Bosnia: “Something, anything must be done,” Wiesel pleaded.

At the same time, members of Congress and senior military officers are increasingly warning of the other pitfall. “All of us want to stop the tragedy in Bosnia,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former pilot who spent five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. “But . . . I’m not willing to risk another Vietnam.”

Clinton has tried to defuse such fears by promising that he is only considering the use of air power in Bosnia, not the introduction of ground troops. Responds McCain, “The fact is, militarily, if you want to affect the situation, you have to inject massive (numbers of) ground troops.”

The President and his advisers do not like the Vietnam analogy but they cannot escape it. Their own careers, their ways of thinking, were forged in the crucible of the nation’s longest war.

White House National Security Adviser Anthony Lake resigned his first White House job–under Richard M. Nixon, in 1970–to protest the relentless escalation of the war. Defense Secretary Les Aspin served as a young Army lieutenant on the Pentagon staff that planned the conflict. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, then a Justice Department official, was assigned to quell the sometimes-violent protests that followed.

And Clinton spent his college years struggling with the issue of the war–whether to volunteer, to resist the draft or, as he finally chose, to maneuver his way out of military service.

On the ground, diplomats and military experts say, Bosnia is not much like Vietnam at all–except, perhaps, for its mountains. In Vietnam, the United States faced a well-armed guerrilla army hardened by years of war against the colonial French. In Bosnia, the Serb militias are said to be ill-trained and ill-disciplined, and their weapons, while effective against their lightly armed Muslim foes, would have little effect against U.S. air power.

In Vietnam, the Communists had an important strategic ally in the Soviet Union. “That had a restraining influence on Johnson, who didn’t want to risk a nuclear confrontation with Moscow,” noted Patrick Glynn of the American Enterprise Institute. “The Serbs don’t have a big brother with nuclear weapons.”

Where the Vietnam analogy is most telling, officials said, is not in the hills of Bosnia but in the corridors of official Washington. Once again, an Administration is thinking about intervention in a tangled civil war–and hoping to find a low-cost way to do it.

“Are we looking at a pattern of decision-making that looks like Vietnam?” asked Glynn, who has advocated military intervention in Bosnia. “I worry that the Administration is falling into an old pattern–a gradualist approach that commits us to action but takes only small steps that don’t solve the problem.”

“The idea of taking only intermediate steps is very dangerous,” agreed John Steinbruner of the Brookings Institution.

“I really do sympathize with Clinton’s dilemma,” he added. “This could blow him out of the water. But I don’t think he can stay out and get away with it. And I don’t think he can do it the easy way. I’m afraid he’s going to have to organize an international coalition and intervene in a big way.”

So far, no one in the Administration has publicly called for that kind of massive intervention, which would presumably include the use of U.S. and allied ground troops. Instead, Clinton and his Cabinet appear closely divided over more limited options–principally, lifting a U.N. embargo to allow the Bosnian Muslims to import weapons and launching air strikes against the Serbs to stop their offensive and force them back to peace talks.

Clinton himself initially tried to stay away from the issue, aides said, hoping he could avoid being diverted from his ambitious domestic agenda. But in recent weeks, he has reluctantly concluded that he cannot escape. “I think it is a challenge to all of us . . . to take further initiatives in Bosnia,” he declared at the Holocaust museum last week. “I accept it.”

And Clinton has accepted the argument that a small, symbolic military action would be worse than none at all. “That shouldn’t be done just to say that people . . . will feel better that we did something,” he said in an interview with the Boston Globe earlier this week.

But he has not worked out how to enforce those high principles in practice. “The essence of the matter isn’t just punishing the Serbs. It’s establishing a principle that this is a breakdown in the world’s civil order and the world has to respond,” said Steinbruner.

Clinton, Christopher and others like to note that the dilemma in Bosnia is one that they inherited from the previous Administration of President George Bush.

But that is becoming cold comfort, as the problem rapidly becomes theirs as well.

“If Bush were in power, he’d be facing the same problems,” Steinbruner noted. “But Bush ignored the problem. The Democrats are reacting the way they do because they have a harder time writing these things off. They’re less ruthless about it. They worry more about the moral questions in foreign policy . . . and so they fall into the natural trap of trying to do something, but not too much.”

WASHINGTON — Amid the din of battle over the federal budget, President Clinton summoned Democratic congressional leaders to the White House last week and gave them an unexpectedly upbeat message: With a little discipline and a little luck, they might win this fight yet.

“The Republicans are very disciplined and very good,” Clinton warned his war council around the Cabinet Room’s long mahogany table, according to people who were present. “But we’re making headway.”

Congress’ drive to cut the budget this spring was launched by triumphant GOP leaders, confident that they had a mandate from voters to slash government programs and shrink the federal budget deficit to zero.

But after three months of rhetorical battle, Clinton believes that he has begun to turn the Republicans’ issue around–into a major political opportunity for himself.

The budget battle is “the centerpiece” of Clinton’s work this year, said White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta. “It will determine a lot about the priorities of the country; it will determine a lot about our economy in the future; it will determine a lot about the role of government.”

It will also determine a lot about how voters view Clinton as the election year of 1996 approaches. “It . . . will better define who the President of the United States is, and I think that’s helpful,” Panetta said in an interview.

Transforming budget-cutting from a liability into an asset would be a startling turnaround for a President whom Republicans succeeded in painting as a “tax-and-spend Democrat” only last year. But public opinion polls read raptly by White House aides suggest that the voters are moving Clinton’s way: An ABC News-Washington Post poll last week found that while respondents by a wide margin once trusted Congress over Clinton to deal with the deficit, the President has nearly closed the gap.

Clinton’s biting attacks on GOP plans to shrink Medicare, education and veterans programs have helped lift his approval rating in the poll to 51%, its highest level in a year.

White House strategists said they were not worried that the House Republicans passed their GOP budget plan last week, as was long expected. More important, they said, was that Clinton apparently succeeded with his threat to veto a GOP spending-cut bill, since the GOP leadership acknowledged that they probably wouldn’t have the votes to override a veto. It showed that the President can still make himself relevant.

Clinton is betting that House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and other GOP leaders overestimated the public’s desire for cutting government–especially once the public realizes that the savings would come not only from unpopular programs, such as welfare and foreign aid, but also from middle-class benefits.

Political strategists note that Clinton’s argument may attract some swing voters–especially white women older than 35, one of the President’s critical demographic targets. Making up more than one-fourth of the electorate, they largely voted for Clinton in 1992, abandoned the Democrats in 1994–and could be key to his prospects in 1996.

At the same time, Clinton and his aides believe that they must eventually seek a budget compromise with the Republicans–if only to avoid the charge that the President has become irrelevant to the process of shrinking the government, a goal most voters still want.

“Preserver of the Big Government status quo is not a place you can end up in a fight this big,” one presidential adviser said.

So Clinton, Panetta and other aides have devised a two-part strategy to try to stop the GOP juggernaut and turn the budget battle to their advantage.

The first phase has been to shift the topic away from the deficit, force the public to confront the kind of cuts the Republicans want and paint the GOP as heartless vandals who would loot Medicare and student loans to give tax cuts to the wealthy.

“Less government? That’s not the issue. The issue is: Do you want your kids to go to college?” Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich said.

If that tactic works, and Republicans retreat from their proposed spending and tax cuts, then the Administration wants to sit down and try to negotiate a compromise, a budget “that might be nobody’s first choice but that is really quite a good budget,” said Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

But Clinton doesn’t want to begin those negotiations until “his leverage is at a peak,” Panetta said, meaning the President wants to continue whipping up public opposition to GOP budget cuts and threatening to veto a budget he doesn’t like, at least for a while.

“The Republicans are beginning the budget triage, amputations and decapitations, and for the moment the Democrats are happy to sit in the surgical theater and watch the blood flow,” said Ross K. Baker, an expert on Congress at Rutgers University.

Already, however, Panetta and other Administration officials have begun sending signals to Capitol Hill about the kind of deal Clinton might eventually want to make.

“Yes, we want additional deficit reduction,” Panetta said. “But in order to engage, the Republicans have to back off these huge tax cuts, they have to recognize that any Medicare or Medicaid savings have to be done in the context of [health care] reform, and they have to be willing to protect education as a key investment.” Almost everything else is “on the table,” he said.

One key concession the White House has quietly offered: Clinton is willing to drop most or all of his proposed $500-per-child tax credit–the core of his long-promised “middle-class tax cut”–if Congress agrees to make college tuition tax-deductible.

Those early signals suggest to some members of Congress, including some worried liberal Democrats, that Clinton may be willing to give up quite a lot–except for his major concerns on Medicare, Medicaid and education–for the chance to claim a victory.

When bargaining can begin in earnest depends mostly on the GOP’s tolerance for pain. Aides say Clinton will stay on the attack for at least three weeks as Republicans pass their budget resolutions and begin making decisions on the discretionary portion of the budget.

But White House officials hope that the solid Republican line will begin to fracture as members of Congress read the mood of their constituents. Some in Congress predict a turning point could come as early as the Memorial Day recess, which begins Saturday, but others warn that it might be September before negotiations start.

The White House strategy is not assured of success, of course. At least three problems loom:

First, Clinton has succeeded only partially in changing the focus of the debate from deficits to middle-class benefits. By a wide margin, the public still says it wants a balanced federal budget, with no deficit. The President’s dirty little secret is that he doesn’t think a balanced budget can be achieved in the foreseeable future at reasonable cost.

In fact, the public is inconsistent on these issues. Large majorities say they want to balance the budget, but equally large majorities say they are opposed to significant cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, student loans and other education programs.

Second, Democrats aren’t entirely unified behind Clinton’s strategy, which is why the President spent much of his meeting in the Cabinet Room last week appealing for more discipline.

Some strains were already evident in the closed-door session, participants said. House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) urged Clinton to give the Republicans no quarter, but Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said: “It’s not enough to complain; we need to say where we go from here.”

Third, and most important, the Republicans may not cooperate. “Democrats have no standing to say anything about what we are doing in the House and the Senate,” House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio) said last week. Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) often disagree with each other, but they agree on one point: They don’t want Clinton to win credit for their hard work in fashioning a leaner federal budget. So they may be tempted to pass a budget bill of their own design and dare Clinton to veto it this fall.

That would lead to a messy confrontation that could require the federal government to halt routine operations until a solution is found.

“I don’t think anyone comes out a winner” in an impasse like that, Panetta said. “I don’t think the President wins; I don’t think Republicans or Democrats win.”