Secrets Of

By Michael Duffy/Washington

One day after he pulled off the biggest win of his presidency with a 234-200 vote in the House for the North American Free Trade Agreement, Bill Clinton was already lining up allies for future battles. As Air Force One carried him to Seattle for a meeting with 13 Asian and Pacific leaders, he called Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO to say their bitter differences on the trade pact should not prevent them from joining forces on health-care reform and worker- retraining plans. He called Dan Rostenkowski and urged the House Ways and Means Committee chairman to push the languishing jobless-benefits bill. From the White House, Hillary Clinton joined in, telephoning Tom Donahue, Kirkland's secretary-treasurer, to make amends. "The President," said one aide, "is into healing."

The come-from-behind win on NAFTA, Clinton's advisers insist, will help prove to voters that the President has the mettle to withstand even tougher fights that loom next year. And they add that the promise of a free-trade zone from the Yukon to the Yucatan makes it easier for Clinton to force trade concessions from Japan and other Asian nations as well as press for a successful completion of the current round of talks on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade by Dec. 15. "A good GATT agreement could create 1.4 million American jobs and boost the average American family income by $1,700 a year," Clinton said in Seattle on Friday. "This, my fellow Americans, is the answer to 20 years of stagnant wages for the hardworking middle class."

Until the NAFTA vote last week, Clinton was a New Democrat in name only. Though his rhetoric often sounded centrist, he had saved most of his energy to keep promises that fit neatly into the tax-and-spend rhythm of the old Democratic Party. But in NAFTA Clinton embraced a treaty fashioned by Republicans, ignored the advice of many around him and defeated a majority in his own party. This time Clinton earned his New Democrat stripes. "Some fights are definitional," said House minority whip Newt Gingrich, whose party provided most of the votes, "and this was one of them."

The next challenge for Clinton will be to construct similar centrist coalitions to pass health-care reform, welfare reform and other contentious initiatives. The NAFTA group "is not really a coalition at all," said a White House official. "It just proves that anytime you get the business community behind something, you get a lot of Republicans. And anytime you get the President, you get a third of the Democratic Party." Indeed, days after the NAFTA vote, a similar group of moderate Democrats and Republicans was poised to approve $90 billion in budget cuts sponsored by John Kasich of Ohio and Tim Penny of Minnesota over Clinton's objections. And a senior Administration official told TIME last week that deteriorating support in Congress for health-care reform may require Clinton to postpone welfare reform until much later next year.

In the short term, Clinton must make amends with those outside the NAFTA coalition. He will pay close attention to the labor wing of the party, soothing bitterness among rust-belt Democrats. Noting that 156 of 258 Democrats opposed him, Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur pointed out that Clinton is out of synch with what she calls the "real core of the Democratic Party" in the House. "I think he's the candidate of Wall Street," she said, "not Main Street." Kaptur predicted that the division will lead to an increase in independent voting and support for Ross Perot's United We Stand. "There are a lot of constituents out there who were abandoned," she said. As Clinton prepares to tackle next year's issues of health-care and welfare reform, he will be able to build on the lessons learned in the NAFTA debate. Among them:

START EARLY Distracted by another life-and-death struggle on the budget, Clinton ignored the looming NAFTA battle until after Labor Day. That gave the opposition time to lock up votes among House Democrats, who tend to be protectionist and mildly isolationist anyway. It also gave Clinton's own advisers, who were split over the wisdom of NAFTA, room to caper: several urged Clinton to pull out of the pact while he still had a chance and began planting the idea with party officials. The result was confusion.

Chief of staff Mack McLarty was looking ahead, pressing Clinton repeatedly for assurances that he wanted to fight for the pact in the fall. Such a battle, McLarty warned, would be bloody. Each time Clinton assented.

In effect, however, the White House didn't get organized until mid- September, when Clinton gave his first speech on behalf of the treaty in the East Room. Behind the scenes, deputy director of communications Rahm Emanuel sent Clinton a three-page, single-spaced memo outlining a two-month strategy in which the President would each week slowly ratchet up his activity on behalf of NAFTA until he was "in total immersion during the last 10 days." The memo acknowledged that Clinton started well behind his opponents, but it argued that a series of meetings with more than 100 undecided members, regular TV appearances and a coordinated campaign with Republicans and business groups would turn the tide. But no sooner had the plan been hatched than Clinton was distracted by foreign policy fiascoes in Somalia and Haiti.

FIND A STRONG RIGHT ARM Clinton had a formidable, if unlikely, ally in Newt Gingrich, a Republican who has a reputation for shooting first and aiming later. The White House dithering led the Republican whip to fire a warning shot across the Administration's bow. Reflecting the fears of his colleagues that Clinton would blame them if NAFTA failed, Gingrich called the President's | efforts at that point "pathetic." Unless Clinton could come up with 100 Democratic votes, Gingrich said, he could not deliver the 118 Republicans needed for victory.

That tactic worked: at an Oct. 22 meeting, a visibly angry Clinton asked Gingrich what he would do. "I want our members," Gingrich replied, "to see you personally engaged so your prestige is at stake." Only if "you put everything on the table," Gingrich said, will the G.O.P. votes hold. Gingrich also played statesman: at one point, after a G.O.P. official urged Clinton to make a nationally televised address supporting the pact, Gingrich interrupted before Clinton could respond: "If we have NAFTA won, then do the speech," counseled Gingrich. "But I don't think it's good for the President to do a speech and then lose the vote." The advice and counsel impressed Clinton, aides report, and led him to promise he would defend Republicans from Democratic attacks for pro-NAFTA votes in the 1994 election. That in turn won Gingrich the confidence of his own, skeptical rank and file.

After that, the two sides worked closely together. But there was some teasing too about the G.O.P. pulling Clinton out of the fire. In Gingrich's office, the computer file that listed G.O.P. votes for Clinton's NAFTA bore a telling name: "Chestnuts."

SEEK PROFESSIONAL HELP McLarty invited top Republican operatives Ken Duberstein, Nick Calio and Billy Pitts to the White House two weeks ago for strategy sessions, probing the veterans for ideas about whom to target, and how to do so. Calio, Bush's top House vote counter for two years, all but moved into Gingrich's Capitol Hill office. Duberstein huddled with McLarty and presidential counselor David Gergen. After talking with Clinton's NAFTA chief Bill Daley, Bush political director Ron Kaufman prevailed on the former President to call nearly a dozen G.O.P. lawmakers last week. Said Wayne Berman, a Republican consultant who worked closely with the White House: "It is a measure of how much the world and rules have changed when Republicans pitch in to help Bill Clinton realize George Bush's legacy."

IF YOU BUY VOTES, DON'T PAY RETAIL To win NAFTA support, the White House cut deals to safeguard certain industries and distribute pork-barrel projects, but most of what was bartered came cheap, in the form of White House promises of presidential appearances and choice committee assignments. Otherwise, there was actually little pork-barreling of the conventional sort. When 20 Republicans threatened to bolt if NAFTA resulted in a tax increase, the White House quietly backed down on passenger fees and fuel taxes for airlines. Bill Sarpalius of Texas and Bill Brewster and Glenn English of Oklahoma pressed for a special break on peanuts and durum-wheat imports from Canada but were probably going to vote with Clinton anyway. Others came for nothing now but knew they held a chit for something later. "Thank you for your courageous support yesterday," a top White House official told a Midwestern lawmaker by telephone the day after the vote. "If you ever need anything, don't hesitate to call me."

PLAY FOR KEEPS After nearly a year in office, Clinton has been weakened by a desire to please everyone and offend no one. But as he scrounged for votes, he crossed a new psychological threshold. When Congressman Bob Torricelli of New Jersey came out against the pact, Clinton fired a rocket his way, penning an acidic message in the margin of a speech Torricelli gave last year in support of free trade: "This was written by a man who cared." When Torricelli telephoned later to discuss the note, Clinton refused to take the call.

When lawmakers from sugar producing states held out until the last minute, NAFTA czar Daley asked Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy to gently remind top sugar lobbyists that their industry had been unscathed by the 1990 farm bill but might not receive such favorable treatment when farm programs come up for review in 1995. "The public is not looking for an innocent as President," said Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg. "They want someone who knows how to use power."

CREATE A SIEGE MENTALITY It is now obvious that the Rhodes scholar turned President likes to pull all-nighters and actually performs best when his presidential prestige is at stake. Early in the year, White House officials insisted that the helter-skelter quality of the place would even out over time and eventually resemble other presidencies. But the line has changed, and officials now realize that Clinton does best in an atmosphere of siege, likes to make enormous changes at the last minute, and takes some comfort in knowing that however bad it might seem now, it was even worse for his idol John F. Kennedy. The continuing crisis will continue. "That's life," said policy adviser George Stephanopoulos last week. "We're going to have to do it a couple of more times."

RESHUFFLE THE STAFF -- AND TAKE A BREAK A senior official admitted late last % week that deputy chief of staff Roy Neel will be leaving the Administration within weeks for a job in the private sector, opening the No. 2 management spot. Neel's departure will bolster those in the Administration who wonder what, if anything, can be done to bring more orderly attention to problems. Some hope New York attorney Harold Ickes, who was passed over for the deputy's job in January, will be pressed to fill Neel's shoes. A court-appointed investigator cleared Ickes last week of allegations that he had acted improperly while representing a labor union with ties to organized crime.

Despite repeated attempts to wean Clinton from micromanagement, he remains at the hub of a dozen or more spokes, acting as his own chief of staff and still seeing as many as 30 people a day. He relies on not one top deputy but a team of four or five aides, and he turns for advice on almost any subject to practically anyone within shouting range. The centralized approach tends to reduce accountability, lengthen response time and leave Clinton trying to do too many things at once. Two weeks ago, early one morning, McLarty had to insist that the President stop signing pictures during a meeting and move away from his desk into another chair to have what he called "a nice, crisp, 10- minute meeting on scheduling." Clinton will finally take a Thanksgiving break at Camp David this week, but only after considerable pulling and tugging by top advisers, who reminded him that Americans distrust a man who is all work and no play.

The real question is whether Clinton has learned that the road to a successful presidency runs through the center of the Congress. Notes Duberstein, who was Reagan's chief of staff: "If Clinton has learned the best way to win is to put together bipartisan coalitions, and not just at the 11th hour, then he has in fact grown for the future."

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett and Ann Blackman/Washington and James Carney with Clinton