HUSHED ON THE STUMP

By GEORGE J. CHURCH BY GEORGE J. CHURCH.

Hillary Rodham Clinton can fire up a friendly crowd--and raise money for Democrats--as few other speakers can. But just hearing her name angers some people. How to capitalize on her 50% favorable rating without grating further on the 45% who view her unfavorably? The First Lady's answer is a stealth campaign.

Four or five days a week, Mrs. Clinton is on the road, addressing mostly preselected audiences from New London, Connecticut, to Los Angeles. But no national journalists are allowed on her plane. If any of them want to cover her appearances, they have to make their own travel arrangements. And commercial flights cannot keep up with Hillary's pace. Nor does the First Lady often make the national-TV news. Last Thursday she told some 300 Generation Xers at a Rock the Vote rally in Los Angeles that they have a bigger stake in the election than older folk "because we're going to be electing people who will set the course for what happens in the 21st century." No sound bite there.

Still, the First Lady cannot escape publicity of the bad sort. Partly on the evidence of the Rose Law Firm billing records that mysteriously turned up on a White House table last January, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation raised new questions last week about Hillary's role in the complex of affairs known as Whitewater. The fdic inspector general's office reported that the failed Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan "used a document drafted by [Mrs.] Clinton to deceive federal bank examiners." The deception lay in disguising the S&L's ownership of more land than federal law permitted. The document was an option agreement strengthening the appearance that the real owner was someone else. Mrs. Clinton has said she does not remember drafting the paper, and the story had been known previously, though in less detail.

Hillary's husband was no help in keeping Whitewater issues quiet. In a TV interview with Jim Lehrer of the Public Broadcasting System, the President was asked about possible pardons for Jim and Susan McDougal, onetime owners of Madison Guaranty and co-investors with the Clintons in Whitewater, and Jim Guy Tucker, Bill Clinton's successor as Governor of Arkansas. All three have been convicted of fraud in cases brought by Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater special prosecutor. Clinton replied, "I've given no consideration" to pardons; then he described in some detail the procedure he would follow if he did. That struck some columnists as dangling the prospect of a pardon in front of Susan McDougal, who has been jailed for contempt because she refused to answer Starr's questions as to whether the President testified truthfully (on videotape) at her trial.

In Sunday's presidential debate, Bob Dole is likely to demand that Clinton rule out any pardons. But a frontal attack on Hillary could make the G.O.P. look like a gang of male chauvinists beating up on a woman who dares to be independent and powerful. They can only hope the media keep the Whitewater issue alive. Hillary's inaccessibility to probing journalists does not make that easy.

--By George J. Church. Reported by Ann Blackman and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WASHINGTON