Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 14, 1993                   TAG: 9311140055
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

STRUGGLES BELIE CLINTON LEGISLATIVE POWER

Within days of his inauguration, a controversy over gays in the military threw his agenda off track and exposed his inexperience and naivete.

He suffered a humiliating defeat on his stimulus package, and rescued the rest of his economic agenda by the barest of margins. And now he faces the possibility of a crippling setback over free trade with Mexico.

Yet President Clinton's batting average with Congress - his ability to get his legislation passed - is the highest of any first-year president in modern history, according to at least two recent studies.

One survey examining Clinton's success in getting congressional approval of controversial legislation found he is scoring a higher winning percentage than Lyndon Johnson in the fabled 1965 legislative session. That year was the zenith of Johnson's power and is generally regarded as the high-water mark of the modern presidency's influence over Congress.

That Clinton's overall record should get lost in the day-to-day news of conflict and setbacks is a sore point with the Democratic leadership in Congress. "It says something about all of us, including the fact that in the American political process, much more attention is paid to defeat and controversy than to success," said Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, D-Maine.

"Obviously, perceptions and reality don't always mesh," added Texas A&M University political scientist John R. Bond, author of one of the studies.

Congressional Quarterly magazine, analyzing all congressional roll call votes through Sept. 14, found that when Clinton took a stand on legislation, he got his way 88.6 percent of the time. It was the highest first-year success rate since Dwight Eisenhower entered office in 1953, the same year in which CQ began its surveys.

But many of those votes were on noncontroversial matters. To get a more precise gauge of Clinton's success on issues that faced significant opposition in Congress, Bond and Richard Fleischer of Fordham University discarded all votes in which more than 80 percent of the House or Senate sided with Clinton, and discovered an even more dramatic result.

By their analysis of "conflictual" votes through Sept. 22, Clinton won 91.3 percent of the votes in the House votes and 92.6 percent in the Senate.

If Clinton continues that streak through the rest of the year, Bond said, he could better the record of LBJ in 1965, when Johnson capitalized on his landslide victory and insider's grasp of Congress to push through his social agenda. That year, Johnson won 90.7 percent of the House votes and 89.4 percent in the Senate.

Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, the Senate's second-ranking Republican and one of Clinton's most dogged adversaries, said he was not surprised by the findings of the two studies, which appear to indicate that years of Washington paralysis may have come to an end.

"This is not gridlock. This is very productive activity that we've been involved with," Simpson added. "As to whether that's good legislation or not, nobody's asked that."

Nor do the voting tallies fully reflect Clinton's struggles.

Some of Clinton's stumbles - such as his defeat in trying to lift the ban on gays in the military - occurred well before the issue made it as far as the House or the Senate floor. And in other areas - keeping his campaign promise to lift the ban on federal funding of abortion, for example - Clinton has simply opted not to press the issue in the face of entrenched congressional opposition. Instead, he has vowed to address it in health care reform.

Clinton's biggest asset was the simple fact that he was the first Democrat to take the White House in 12 years - and a natural political ally for the Democratic Congress. Lawmakers loaded the legislative pipeline with bills that it had approved over and over again but had been unable to get past Republican presidents.

"They trotted out almost every painful thing they've been thwarted on," Simpson said.

Family leave legislation, a new law requiring states to allow people to register to vote when they get their driver's licenses, looser restrictions on political activities by federal employees - all had fallen under former President Bush's 46 vetoes, and all were eagerly signed into law by Clinton.