CLINTON'S STEALTH CAMPAIGN

By ERIC POOLEY/WASHINGTON

Everything about the moment invited Bill Clinton to overreach. In the great vaulted nave of the Washington National Cathedral, television lights chased away the shadows and 4,700 people leaned forward in their pews as the President began his eulogy for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. Seven days had passed since the plane crash in Croatia that killed Brown and 34 others, days filled with the high emotionalism of flag-draped coffins and sobbing families, and during that time, Clinton stretched his verbal gifts to the limit. At Dover Air Force Base when the dead came home, he gave the speech of his life, a psalm of patriotism, sacrifice and redemption. "Life is more than what we know," he said. "Life is more than what we can understand. Life is more than, sometimes, even we can bear. But life is also eternal." How could he go beyond that now?

He knew better than to try. Clinton delivered a nice eulogy, full of humor and fond remembrance, but he didn't soar. Maybe he was tired of metaphysics; maybe his instincts told him to give it a rest. But when Brown's flag had been folded and taps had been played, Clinton did one more thing in memory of his friend. He got in a helicopter, flew to Baltimore, Maryland, and raked in $800,000 at two campaign fund raisers. If he hadn't gone, Clinton knew, Brown would have raised hell.

The day encompassed the two Clinton re-election campaigns, one ceremonial and the other stealthy, being run out of the White House. If neither looks much like the real thing--there's no campaign manager, not even a declared candidate--that's the idea. "The key to the campaign right now," says White House political director Doug Sosnik, "is not to have one."

The combination of lofty public appearances and quietly effective political operations helps explain why a President who polled historic levels of unpopularity a year ago now enjoys a 10-to-15-point lead over his Republican opponent and his highest favorable ratings in two years. Just last summer Sosnik was touring the country trying to persuade Democrats that the race wasn't hopeless. Now he has to remind them that it isn't in the bag.

Clinton can thank the Republicans for initiating his recovery: they let him make off with their best idea, balancing the budget in seven years. By claiming that goal as his own, and fending off the harshest ideas--never mind that his most painful cuts wouldn't kick in until after he left town--Clinton emerged with the upper hand. The White House message factory, run by political consultant Dick Morris, a two-party switch-hitter, helped him turn that success into a full-blown strategy. Suddenly, the Big Government, health-care blunderer had seized the political center, setting up shop ever-so-slightly to the left of the Republicans and positioning himself as America's last defense against G.O.P. "extremists." Since the Republicans control Congress, he opted for an illusion of control, which suits him just fine. In this almost holographic approach, speeches are as important as substance and rhetoric becomes its own reality. For this President, says senior adviser George Stephanopoulos, "words are actions."

For the White House stealth forces led by deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, though, action still speaks louder. The political team executed the first phase of the ground war last year, scaring off potential primary opponents by building a huge war chest and organizing hard in Iowa and New Hampshire. Now Sosnik and the political-affairs team that works out of the West Wing basement are moving into the middle game with precious little noise. The campaign last week wouldn't even confirm the names of state-campaign directors that have been published in the trade journal Campaigns & Elections. Yet Clinton's politicos have almost finished choosing directors for the key states, and within a month massive hiring will begin for the 50 Democratic coordinated campaigns that use party money to push Clinton. The strategy is to spend party money first, hoarding until summer the $20 million the President can spend before the convention.

Morris and media veteran Bob Squier have been quietly prosecuting their air war since last August, hitting local television markets with $20 million worth of commercials while the national media barely noticed. Time has obtained a map detailing where the Clinton-Gore campaign and the Democratic National Committee have spent their advertising dollars since Jan. 20. It reads like a road map for the general election. Presidential campaigns aren't national elections so much as 50 statewide contests, with perhaps 20 bitterly contested and crucial to the outcome. Clinton strategists say they'll spend the spring and summer trying to figure out which states they can safely ignore. But it appears that they have already settled where to fight and where to fold.

With a few exceptions, Clinton has been holding onto his base in the North, spending heavily in the dozen battleground states he won in 1992, giving up on Texas and the Great Plains and ignoring eight other states he lost badly. What is telling, Republicans say, is that Clinton is already reaching deeper than expected into territory the G.O.P. held narrowly in the three-way race of 1992. "They're going where they think the swing ducks are," says G.O.P. media adviser Mike Murphy.

Heavy ad buys in the Mountain States of Colorado and New Mexico suggest that Clinton wants to construct a Maginot Line between the Republican West and his must-win fortress, California. He appears bent on winning North Carolina and Florida, states that eluded him last time. Except for Little Rock, Arkansas, where he is making "show buys" to impress hometown contributors, the cities of North Carolina are getting the heaviest saturation of the Southern market. Yet Clinton is a realist. He has reluctantly agreed to forget Texas--though if Perot gets in and hurts Dole, that judgment could change.

The primary ad targets are in large-to-medium-size swing cities like Hartford, Connecticut; Kansas City, Kansas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Raleigh, North Carolina, home to the disgruntled middle-income suburban families that hold the key to the President's re-election. To get their attention, Clinton and the D.N.C. have bombarded them with two kinds of ads: misleading assaults on Dole and stern values-preaching spots, including one with the slogan No Work, No Welfare, which is indistinguishable from the G.O.P. version. But carefully aimed traditional Democratic messages are beginning to fly under the radar. Among them is a stark black-and-white spot about battered wives that has popped up on daytime TV in small markets, aimed at the pivotal "angry woman" vote.

The stealth campaign has also been busy serving up pork for the battleground states. Some is the old-fashioned Golden Fleece variety, like the $493 million announced in March for California's flagging aerospace industry to add another B-2 bomber to the arsenal, just a month after the Administration reaffirmed its no-more-B-2s policy. But much is cleverly presented as the kind of necessary rail, airport and hospital improvements that win bipartisan support, and will allow Clinton to hold triumphant rallies when he comes through town this fall taking credit. "We're 3 1/2 years into this term, so there's a lot in the pipeline," says Sosnik, who denies that the largesse has been accelerated. "Good government still makes for good politics."

While the stealth campaign has been hugging the ground, Clinton's ceremonial strategy has, because of the Ron Brown tragedy, spread its wings in ways no one could have anticipated. An Administration once concerned with the Politics of Meaning is riding high on the Politics of Mourning. The President's public performance had its own secret logic; the high-profile obsequies undoubtedly scored well in the black community. But only because they were authentic. He was deeply committed to his role as minister in chief, even if he was also fully aware of the political benefit he was picking up from his handling of the crisis. "It helps him," says Republican pollster Bob Teeter, "whenever a tragedy or foreign-policy crisis forces him to act like a President."

But Clinton has been confounding the Republicans by acting enormously presidential since the fall. With accelerating speed and force, he has been laying claim to their issues, using their patented techniques: giving value-laden, policy-free speeches on a pretested, socially conservative agenda, from school uniforms and educational standards to tobacco and TV ratings. White House glitter wraps the messages in attractive pictures; free television carries them across the country. Just a week after Clinton began speaking out on kids and smoking last August, his tacticians were astounded to discover that his message had registered with two-thirds of the people. "It's a form of leadership that's tailored to the era of divided government," explains White House communications director Don Baer. "We put it in play, the media cover it, and people respond."

That strategy lets the President follow the first and most important of what Time has identified as his Five Rules of the Ceremonial Campaign--the basic stratagems that will turn up time and again between now and November:

Rule No.1: Grab credit for every positive development. When gutsy whistle-blowers broke their silence about Big Tobacco, Clinton's aides claimed the President had "cracked the industry's solid front." When AT&T decided it didn't need to lay off quite so many workers, Clintonites chalked it up to their man's speeches on corporate responsibility. "He can't take unilateral credit for any of this," concedes a Clinton strategist. "But so what?"

Rule No. 2: Always lead with a lofty New Democratic moral message, then feel free to cater to the Old Dem base. Thus a riff about defending Medicare will follow a set piece about balancing the budget. The strategy was enshrined in the State of the Union speech, when red-meat Democratic issues like the minimum wage and health insurance were buried in a blizzard of centrist messages about welfare reform, television violence and teen pregnancy. But the New Democrat values achieved something not even Dick Morris could have foreseen. They got people accustomed to hearing the President ruminating aloud over America's proper path and set the table for the kind of moral leadership Clinton offered so dazzlingly when Brown's plane went down or, two days later in Oklahoma City, when he transformed that tragedy into a powerful sermon on government's proper place in American life and a stinging rebuke of those who call government the root of all evil.

Rule No. 3: Avoid anything that smacks of Big Government; dwell on instances of good government. Clinton's defense of his Administration will frequently mention the 200,000 federal workers he has eliminated. But also expect to see plenty of footage of the President talking to flood and earthquake victims, evoking the solid disaster-relief work done by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Nobody is against government when there's a lake in the living room.

Rule No. 4: Deploy the power of the presidency whenever possible. Last week Republicans accused Clinton of "polluting Earth Day with dirty politics" because he plans to send Administration officials to 36 federally sponsored Earth Day rallies around the country, most in districts held by embattled first-term Republicans bent on dismantling federal environmental laws. It was a potent reminder of how the vast federal apparatus can help "amplify the President's...message," as an EPA memo about the Earth Day plan put it.

Rule No. 5: Avoid class warfare at all costs. In 1992, Clinton campaign strategist James Carville did all he could to play to the have-nots of the "Bush recession." But the economy turned up, Carville is on the lecture circuit, and the new team led by Morris believes that emphasizing economic divisions alienates more than it attracts.

That argument undervalues the Clinton team's best weapon: candidate Clinton's ability to frame issues with exquisite precision. In the current debate over corporate responsibility, for example, Clinton called for a minimum-wage increase and voluntary corporate paternalism. Without risking much, he could dial up his rhetoric and really speak for Americans gnawed by economic insecurity. But he won't do so, for fear of scaring off corporate contributors.

Nobody in Clinton's camp thinks his numbers are going to stay this high for long. The race will tighten, and some strategists, including Ickes, criticized the early media buys, arguing that boosting the numbers in winter would mean little come fall. Morris, however, believes softening up the electorate early makes it easier to win the votes back in November. "You go for people when you can get them, when they're listening," agrees Stephanopoulos. "And then you just try to hold onto 'em."

That's not far from the wisdom Clinton offered at Ron Brown's funeral, when he read aloud from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians. "Let us not grow weary in doing good," Christ's disciple wrote. "For in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart." Paul, of course, was referring to a heavenly reward. But another kind of harvest must have crossed Clinton's mind.

--With reporting by Michael Duffy and Mark Thompson/Washington