Clinton Seeks to Make Nov. 3 a Referendum

WASHINGTON —  Embroiled in a budget fight with an impeachment-minded Congress, President Clinton on Sunday urged voters to turn the midterm election into a national referendum, clearly hoping they will send Washington the message that they care more about pocketbook issues than the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal.

With just 22 days to go before the Nov. 3 election, Clinton’s comments significantly elevated the stakes. Most analysts believe, and polls suggest, that Republicans could make broad gains in both houses of Congress in part because outrage over Clinton’s adulterous affair with a young intern could energize Republicans to vote in greater numbers than Democrats.

But Clinton expressed confidence that voters will reject the GOP-led impeachment drive. “That is a decision for Americans. I trust them. I think they’ll make the right decision,” he said.

Clinton made his remarks at an afternoon White House strategy session with Capitol Hill Democrats on the budget negotiations with the GOP majority in Congress.

Although the fiscal year is nearly two weeks old, Clinton and the Republicans have yet to agree on a comprehensive spending plan for fiscal 1999. With little progress Sunday, negotiations to resolve their many differences may well keep Congress in town for several more days, preventing lawmakers from going home to campaign.

Clinton also seemed eager to join that fray. He is scheduled to hit the campaign trail to raise money and stump for Democratic candidates in New York. The plan drew fire over the weekend from GOP leaders who complained that Clinton should remain in town until a new federal budget is completed.

The White House, perhaps sensitive to the appearance of deserting budget talks, canceled plans for a Tuesday fund-raising trip to Florida. White House spokesman Barry Toiv said Sunday that Clinton will stay in Washington until this afternoon to monitor budget talks before leaving for New York.

“Tuesday is a day of hard work; it certainly will be on the president’s part,” Toiv said.

But the president defended his efforts to focus public attention on the elections.

“What I intend to do is to bring the issues to the American people,” he told reporters at the White House.

“What I’d like to see this election be about is the American people and their future, not about Washington, D.C.,” he said, alluding to the impeachment inquiry by the House Judiciary Committee over allegations that he committed perjury and obstructed justice while attempting to conceal an affair with the former White House intern.

The president’s remarks seem to be a calculated, but nonetheless high-risk, strategy.

If Republicans score major gains on Nov. 3, they will surely portray the results as a public rebuke of the president, thus complicating his legislative agenda and his hopes of avoiding impeachment.

To be sure, his job-approval ratings remain high, and poll after poll shows that most Americans want an expeditious resolution to the Lewinsky matter short of impeachment.

Yet the party controlling the White House typically loses 35 or more House seats and as many as half a dozen Senate seats in its sixth year of occupying the Oval Office.

And if Republicans come close to making such gains in this year’s election, they could well be further emboldened to proceed with an impeachment vote. If a majority of the GOP-dominated House prevails in such a vote, the Senate will put Clinton on trial. If convicted by two-thirds of the Senate, he will be removed from office.

Over the weekend, both Congress and the president stayed in town in hopes of settling an array of policy differences and completing a federal budget for fiscal year 1999, which began Oct. 1.

Already, Clinton and Congress have agreed to two stopgap funding bills to avert a government shutdown. The second “continuing resolution” to keep government running expires at midnight tonight, and GOP leaders said Sunday that a third extension might be needed.

“I think we probably will have another,” House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) said. “We’ve got some big problems ahead of us.”

So far, work has been completed on less than half of the 13 appropriations bills that fund government operations.

Among the differences in the budget negotiations are education spending, abortion policies, the 2000 census and funding for the International Monetary Fund.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) expressed optimism that eventually “cooler heads will prevail” and a budget deal will be worked out. But he said the White House seems “distracted” by Thursday’s House vote to launch an impeachment inquiry.

A major point of contention is Clinton’s proposal for 100,000 new elementary school teachers and a $5-billion school renovation program, initiatives that Clinton promoted Sunday for the second straight day.

But Lott said Republicans basically share those goals.

“The difference is, they want it to be controlled and run, they want all the money in Washington, and they want it to dribble down, dribble down, eventually get to the local community and schools,” he said. “We want the money to get to the parents, the teachers, and the administrators at the local level.”

Several GOP leaders on Sunday also echoed Lott’s criticisms of Clinton for not being more personally involved in the budget talks.

“The president, quite frankly, has been AWOL all year long,” Armey said. “He’s about to take tomorrow his 100th campaign trip, to go up to New York for a million-dollar fund-raiser for [Senate candidate] Chuck Schumer, a member of the [House] Judiciary Committee, which I think is a rather interesting thing.”

Asked if he was suggesting an impropriety, Armey responded: “Well, I think it does--I think obviously there’s a reason to wonder if he should do that.”

Clinton seemed unfazed by such criticism, focusing instead on issues that he said he intends to promote in the coming days, such as preserving the Social Security trust fund and enacting a patients’ “bill of rights” to empower consumers enrolled in managed care systems.

“The American people will have to decide if they believe that Social Security should be saved,” the president said. “The American people will have to decide whether they really want a patients’ bill of rights. . . . These are the kinds of decisions the American people will have to make about what they want for their future.”