After NAFTA Vote, President Looking to Collect More Wins : Clinton: A successful summit in Seattle could further boost his stature in the eyes of the public, aides say.

SEATTLE —  President Clinton put away his tally sheets and his campaign hat and headed west Thursday, looking forward to something he has not had a chance to do as President--capitalize on an indisputable congressional victory.

White House aides hope that the vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement--both the victory and the unexpected size of the margin--will provide Clinton substantial new stature and leverage as he meets over the next two days in Seattle with leaders of Asia and the Pacific region, particularly Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, both of whom he is scheduled to meet today.

But Clinton will need every bit of the boost he can get because, while aides were euphoric about Wednesday’s victory, they concede that the latest victory is not likely to get Clinton’s presidency off the roller coaster.

The indications of what lies ahead were visible even as the White House celebrated the NAFTA victory. In his televised statement after the vote and two brief speeches Thursday, Clinton only barely looked back to focus public attention on his win before talking about two fights he will engage next year--the quest for health care reform and his proposal to establish a new system of worker retraining to replace the nation’s unemployment system.

His advisers believe a successful Asia summit meeting here, coming after the trade victory in Congress, would further boost Clinton’s stature in the eyes of the public.

Already, aides insist, he has benefited from his victory. The vote “sends a very positive signal that this President is willing to fight,” said presidential counselor David Gergen. “That’s an important signal to send to the rest of the world, and I think it’s also an important political signal back home.”

Passage of the trade agreement is “just the first step,” Clinton said, as he urged “the coalition that passed NAFTA to help me” in the next round of legislative efforts.

Yet even as White House operatives prowled the Capitol on Wednesday to nail down final NAFTA votes, Clinton’s senior aide, George Stephanopoulos, and his budget director, Leon A. Panetta, were lobbying members of Congress over a potentially crucial House vote on the federal budget likely to come on Monday--one on which, once again, Clinton is starting out behind.

The pattern of come-from-behind victories followed almost immediately by yet another major test has defined Clinton’s tenure so far and has proven a major problem for him, giving the public the sense of a constantly embattled President.

“We never really get a chance to savor our wins,” said Clinton adviser Mandy Grunwald.

The effect shows up in polls, which have shown public approval of Clinton drifting gradually upward most of this fall but which also show the toll of the constant battles. The surveys tend to show substantial majorities in favor of Clinton’s policy goals, but many doubts about his ability to achieve them. And public doubts about his leadership ability strongly correlate with overall views of Clinton’s performance.

Clinton’s roller coaster has many causes.

Republicans who worked with the White House in the NAFTA battle say they gained new respect for the ability of Clinton’s team and for the President’s own skill as a legislative horse-trader. But, they add, the nature of the Clinton presidency makes things harder for the White House.

“Once they get geared up and everybody’s committed, they’re fairly impressive,” said a former Bush Administration official involved in the NAFTA fight. “But it takes too long, sometimes, for them to realize what they need to do.”

Clinton’s aides, for their part, point repeatedly not only to the number of things he has pledged to accomplish, but also to the difficulty of the issues he has taken on--raising taxes to reduce the budget deficit, boosting free trade at a time of economic insecurity, revamping the nation’s entire health system.

The argument has considerable validity, outside scholars say. “It’s hard to think of another President who has taken on so many tough issues this early,” said William Leuchtenberg, a presidential historian and biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Making matters more difficult is the fact that Clinton, elected with only 43% of the vote, must create a majority coalition afresh with each new issue.

Last summer, on the budget, for example, Clinton created a coalition of liberal and moderate Democrats--leaving aside all Republicans and many conservative Democrats--to form a bare majority. On NAFTA, by contrast, Clinton knew he would lose most of his party’s liberal and labor-oriented members of Congress and would, therefore, have to form a coalition of Democratic and Republican moderates.

Those two coalitions could not exist at the same time, forcing Clinton to delay any NAFTA campaign until after the budget vote was done, noted one senior Clinton aide. “If we had started talking about NAFTA in July, you could have kissed the budget goodby. Impossible,” the aide said. “Was an active NAFTA campaign going to bring Republican votes on the budget? I don’t think so.”

In turn, however, that calculation all but guaranteed that NAFTA opponents would get a major head start in the debate, meaning that Clinton would have to fight from behind.

But those constraints of policy and political reality do not entirely explain the roller coaster nature of the Clinton tenure. Even close aides concede that part of the explanation lies in the personality of the President.

Clinton prefers ad-hoc working groups to structured hierarchies. He resists making decisions until he must--supporters prefer to say he likes to keep options open as long as he can. He seldom completes work on a major speech or policy until the last minute. And he often springs ideas on his advisers with little notice--much in contrast with his predecessor, George Bush, who preferred to have aides bring options to him rather than initiate them himself.

Many Clinton aides hotly defend the President’s operating style. “These sorts of questions really tick me off,” said one. “Look at what we’ve gotten done. It may not fit well onto an organization chart, but it’s working.”

Others, however, say Clinton’s way of organizing his own time and his White House have posed problems.

“They need to get away from the war-room mentality,” said one longtime Democratic operative close to Clinton. “They have got to be able to handle several things without each one becoming a crisis. That’s what they haven’t done.”

“You get things done, but you frighten the heck out of your allies,” he said. “There’s also a very high burnout factor. You can’t keep going like this forever.”