Clinton Carefully Picks Medium and Message : Campaign: He controls appearances, issuing video statements instead of dealing with the press in order to focus on one issue: the economy.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. —  Autumn changes the pattern of the presidential campaign. Candidates who ambled around the countryside for months, talking to anyone who would talk to them, instead pick their appearances with strategic deliberation.

The crowds that surround the candidate are more carefully chosen. Local television anchors are more carefully courted. Political reporters who cover the candidate regularly are, to put it politely, shown the door.

The force of the campaign transfers from the summertime goal of maintaining a presence before vacation-minded voters to the aim of sticking toughly to a well-defined message.

In Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton’s case, the message is simple: the economy. An example of his desire to focus directly on it and nothing else came Thursday, when President Bush delivered an economic address that demanded a Clinton response.

The Arkansas governor, spending the day on state business in Little Rock, could have gathered the television network correspondents and reporters who travel daily with him and who were ensconced Thursday in a hotel little more than a mile from his mansion.

Instead, he ordered up satellite time and dispatched a video statement over the airwaves. Then he spoke by satellite to anchormen at three stations in Detroit, where the President gave his address and which is, not coincidentally, the largest city in one of the crucial electoral states.

Four times, Clinton pressed his contention that the President’s plan was too little, too late.

“Why did it take you over 3 1/2 years just to come up with more of the same?” Clinton asked Bush rhetorically. “It hasn’t worked. It’s given us the slowest growth in 50 years, the loss of manufacturing jobs, declining incomes--it hasn’t worked and it won’t work.

“We’ve got a great opportunity to change course, to invest, to cooperate, to compete, to educate. That’s what I want to do.”

Within an hour after Clinton made his remarks, they were being broadcast on CNN.

The reporters whose business it is to cover Clinton never saw him in the flesh. They heard his remarks in a room at Clinton campaign headquarters, where his voice came over a speaker phone. Occasionally, the phone wires crossed and Clinton’s remarks were overridden by the voice of a man discussing an out-of-body experience in the Holy Land.

The point of campaigning by video was to keep the focus on the subjects Clinton wants to discuss, which are not necessarily the things political reporters want to ask. By limiting what is said in public, a candidate limits what is written or televised about him.

“There’s only 55 days left and we’re going to talk about the economy and health care and jobs and education,” said Clinton’s campaign press secretary, Dee Dee Myers. “And we’re going to keep talking about those things.”

The phenomenon is hardly limited to Clinton. In 1988, George Bush went so long without speaking to the reporters traveling with him that they purchased electric bullhorns with which to shout questions. Seeing them, Bush laughed and shook his head.

Clinton has been avoiding his trailing crew for a few days, a move that appears to be timed to his desire to avoid continuing questions about his draft record.

Much as Bush did in the fall of 1988, Clinton is favoring local television stations, whose reporters tend not to be as familiar with his past statements and ask what are generally considered softer questions.

That was demonstrated Thursday when Clinton, in an interview, declared that Bush’s plan would raise the elderly’s Medicare costs, cut disability payments to 1.2 million veterans and force millions of students to pay thousands more each in loan payments.

“Has George Bush said that?” the WJBK anchorman asked, with an air of disapproval that Bush would invoke such harsh cuts.

“Yes,” Clinton said.

Actually, the cuts were listed as options in the Administration’s midsession budget review, and Bush has not signed off on any of them. But Clinton’s comment went unquestioned.

The strategy doesn’t always work. Anchorman Mort Crim of WDIV opened his interview asking not about Clinton’s preferred topic but instead about whether he had come to a decision on the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement.

Clinton, who has not decided whether to back the pact, said he was studying the issue. Crim followed up by questioning Clinton’s past support of legislation that would raise the average auto mileage standard from 27.5 m.p.g. to 40 m.p.g. within a decade.

That position is not popular in Detroit, where auto makers fear that higher mileage requirements will put them out of business.

“When I mentioned the 40 m.p.g. limit, I said that it would be a goal,” said Clinton, who has been edging away from the legislation for about a month. “I never said it would be written into the law as an iron rule.”

Although Clinton was put on the defensive briefly, he did manage to repeat his criticisms of Bush’s plan in all three interviews.

Campaign officials believe that the strategy of relative isolation makes the message easier to manage. And spokeswoman Myers all but predicted that Clinton will go further into his shell as the campaign wears on.

“We have formal news conferences periodically and we have informal news conferences almost every day,” she said. “I don’t know that that’ll continue as much as it has been.”