NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Seeks to Lower 1st-Year Expectations

Even as he tells his supporters to keep their focus on Election Day and not slacken their efforts, Bill Clinton is quietly slipping into his public appearances a subtle message aimed at lowering expectations for the first year of a Clinton presidency.

“I do not promise miracles in the fight on crime,” he said the other day in just one of several recent instances in which he has signaled that a new Clinton Administration could not be expected to solve the nation’s problems in its first days, weeks or months.

More than simply reflecting the confidence that appears to have overtaken the Clinton camp, the subtle warnings serve an extremely important long-term purpose. They demonstrate that the Democratic presidential nominee may have learned a crucial lesson dating back at least to the first year of the Jimmy Carter Administration.

The lesson is this: The support a President gains in his first year in office, which he can then use to put pressure on a recalcitrant Congress as well as to build a base for his own reelection, depends heavily on how he lives up to the expectations invested in him by the American people on the first day that he walks into the Oval Office.

After promising the nation a government as good as its people in the days after the Watergate scandal, Carter flooded Congress with legislative proposals, including a tax plan he had to withdraw. He was swamped in the political wake when he failed to win passage of many of his early goals, as well as by the impact of several early personnel missteps.

Ronald Reagan, by contrast, successfully concentrated on gaining swift approval for tax cuts and for new budget priorities that stressed limiting funds for social programs and increasing defense spending.

And President Bush entered office with limited and ill-defined goals that left the nation unsure what he wanted to accomplish. It was a path that left him few measuring points at which he could demonstrate progress.

A senior Clinton campaign official said Sunday that the model of limited expectations, coupled with a mood of optimism that was carefully set by Reagan and his aides, is the path the Democratic campaign is following. But he insisted that the course was not consciously patterned after Reagan.

It is a prudent approach, said Democrats and Republicans experienced in the complicated mix of governing and politics.

“It sounds like he’s beginning to get people in a realistic frame of mind about where we’re going and how we’ll get there,” said Jody Powell, Carter’s White House press secretary.

“It will be a problem if they let (expectations) get out of hand. They have to make it clear Inauguration Day isn’t the opening up of the floodgates.”

To an enthusiastic crowd gathered Friday night in the river-side park in New Orleans near the spot where George Bush introduced Dan Quayle as his running mate four years ago, Clinton said: “We don’t have all the answers, and we know our country didn’t get into this mess overnight and we are not going to get out of it overnight.”

Clinton is avoiding any talk of serious sacrifice on the part of the American people--a certain political loser. Nor has he spoken of a nation falling into despair, a “malaise,” as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy derisively characterized Carter’s own downbeat assessment of the mood of the country in 1979.

Rather, he is trying to bring the American people into the solution, to make them, in effect, as responsible for tackling the economic and social problems as he would be as President.

“What I promise you is a partnership--not rhetoric, not hot speeches, not cheap 30-second television ads but a genuine partnership to make the people of this country safer and to make our policies saner,” he said to a group of state attorneys general and district attorneys who offered him their endorsement on Saturday.

In a recent interview with The Times, Hillary Clinton, the candidate’s wife, talked about the likelihood that her husband’s campaign would be able to strike a chord with a majority of Americans “in a deep and sustainable way, which is part of what Bill is trying to do.”

She said she and her husband had talked about the fact that “an enormous effort” would be required to keep “people committed to change even when it isn’t going to be overnight.”

“Part of what we’re trying to do is build a big enough reservoir of hope and optimism that it can be done even if it is hard,” she said.

That means walking a fine line between raising expectations that problems can be dealt with while also avoiding hope for simple, quick solutions--and accomplishing the latter without sounding discouraging and negative.

As portrayed by the Bush campaign, the cautionary notes have occurred because Clinton “is starting to get caught up in his flip-flops,” said spokeswoman Torie Clarke.

As portrayed by the Clinton camp, they are simply a matter of realism.

“It’s something he (Clinton) has been very conscious of all fall,” said George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s director of communications. “We’ve got to prepare people for difficult choices and pulling together. It is being straight with them. It stands in contrast with Bush, who won’t recognize the problem.”

The President’s critics have said that he failed to see the connection between politics and governing. He sought to divorce himself from the angry 1988 campaign immediately after Election Day four years ago, then failed after taking office to lay a foundation for his own reelection.

The need for a more seamless meeting point between political operations and governing may not have been lost on the Clinton organization, despite its public insistence that it is focusing entirely on the need to first win the election.

“I suspect it has something to do with the very real possibility that he’ll end up having to govern, which is a whole other deal,” said one Democratic consultant, who asked that he not be identified by name.

“You set a tone that first year for what people expect you to accomplish,” said Thomas C. Griscom, whose work as director of communications in the White House helped restore Reagan’s popularity after the Iran-Contra scandal.

In times of trouble, the country has come to demand sea changes in its fortunes as it installs new leaders. If Clinton is elected, he will be dealing not only with that phenomenon, but with 12 years of pent-up demands by Democrats frustrated by three terms of Republican presidencies.

“There are a helluva lot of stymied Democratic agendas and there is no way you can deal with all of them or most of them,” Powell said. “He’s got to be able to say they are worthwhile, but we can’t do it now.”

“The question is,” Griscom said, “can you build an appreciation for how and when those changes will occur? It is manageable if you focus on it.”

Times staff writer David Lauter, in Washington, contributed to this story.