ANOTHER BUDGETARY SOUND BITE

Flurry of Revelations Designed to Cast Clinton in Favorable Light

President Clinton offered another sneak preview of his proposed 2000 budget
yesterday, trumpeting about $215 million his plan includes to help states
impose tougher drug testing and treatment policies for prisoners and parolees.

The Roosevelt Room announcement was the latest in a flurry of formal
announcements and orchestrated leaks coming from the White House about its
budget. The goal, say White House aides, is for these flurries to
accumulate into a fresh blanket of domestic policy initiatives between now
and Clinton's State of the Union address, planned for Jan. 19, and the
official release of his budget on Feb. 1.

For the White House, the careful staging of the budget is an old trick
aimed at a new problem: With the Senate on the brink of an impeachment
trial, Clinton needs more than ever to demonstrate that he remains at work
trying to implement popular policies.

On Dec. 19, the same day the House passed impeachment articles against
Clinton, a group of budget and political aides gathered in the Roosevelt
Room with a calendar. The purpose, aides said yesterday, was to map out a
strategy for releasing newsworthy nuggets in Clinton's budget plan.

A meeting a few days later in White House press secretary Joseph Lockhart's
office was even more specific. Aides for a White House that has denounced
"unauthorized leaks" put together a plan for which news organizations would
be the recipient of authorized leaks about the budget.

True to schedule, the leaks started coming over the New Year's break. The
New York Times got advance billing of Clinton's defense spending plan.
Officials laid out for The Washington Post proposals for regulating food
safety. And several news organizations were briefed a day before Clinton
announced on Monday a proposed tax credit to help families offset the cost
of care for people with long-term disabilities.

Profiting from the release of the budget is one of the advantages of
incumbency. And White House officials said it only makes sense for them to
maximize that profit by releasing the details over time, rather than
putting them all into public view in one news cycle.

But Republicans grouse that there is something fundamentally misleading
about the White House's budget strip-tease. Clinton and his aides have
happily divulged some of what they believe will be the most popular
features of the budget, but have refused to say precisely how they plan to
pay for new spending.

Under the balanced-budget agreement he reached with Congress, there are
tight limits that obligate Clinton to identify the funding source for new
programs. And Clinton himself has insisted that all money from the budget
surplus be saved pending a long-term overhaul of Social Security. But the
president has given no one in the public or on Capitol Hill the information
to assess the trade-offs he and his budget team have made.

"It's a less-than-honest presentation," said Ari Fleisher, spokesman for
the House Ways and Means Committee. "To date, the administration has leaked
in a self-serving manner just the news they want made."

The news the administration does not want made, Fleisher suspects, is that
it intends to pay for its programs through devices that Clinton will
describe as adjusting fees or closing loopholes but that Republicans will
call by another label: tax hikes.

In last year's budget, Fleisher said, Clinton's budget identified nearly
$39 billion over five years through various revenue adjustments, but
Republicans eventually agreed that only $2 billion of that total
represented legitimate loophole closures.

White House officials said the totality of their budget will be clear soon
enough, once the formal document is released. In the meantime, they have
disparaged suggestions that Clinton's policy schedule is motivated by a
desire to provide a contrast with the impeachment drama playing out on
Capitol Hill.

Referring to a pending administration report on steel imports, Lockhart
joked at yesterday's White House briefing, "Oh, it's just this afternoon's
attempt to divert attention."

White House counselor Paul Begala noted that the White House is laying out
its agenda in a way closely mirroring what it did a year ago -- before the
name Monica S. Lewinsky came into popular parlance. "It's not a strategy,
it's the presidency -- this is what we do," Begala said.

Yet even if Clinton would be following much the same schedule in a
non-scandal environment, advisers acknowledge that announcements such as
yesterday's do serve a secondary purpose. Clinton has managed to withstand
scandal and keep his approval ratings high, they said, in large measure
because the public believes he has stayed focused on his agenda.

For yesterday's event, Clinton was surrounded by Attorney General Janet
Reno and White House drug policy director Barry R. McCaffrey as he
announced his planned new money. Administration officials show that 45
percent of federal prisoners and 55 percent of state prisoners reported
drug use in the month prior to their crimes, suggesting that better
treatment and testing of prisoners and parolees could make a long-term dent
in crime statistics.