Key Challenges Await Clinton--if He Is to Achieve Greatness : Presidency: History shows a leader’s goals, his dialogue with country and his dealings with Congress can help make him ‘as big a man as he can be.’

WASHINGTON —  “The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can,” Woodrow Wilson wrote--if only he can get “the nation behind him.”

Bill Clinton, who is to take the oath of office as the 42nd President of the United States today, has never been shy about measuring himself against greatness. He fills his speeches with echoes of the Democratic heroes of our century--Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy. Asked recently which of his predecessors he should be compared with, Clinton answered without hesitation: “Somewhere between Roosevelt and Kennedy.”

Like any candidate who has triumphed in the grueling test of a presidential election, the 46-year-old former governor of Arkansas comes to Washington already blessed with the raw material for success: a prodigious intellect, daunting political skills, large ambitions, wide public support.

At the same time, Clinton’s winning attributes have sometimes appeared at war with each other: He has been both an innovative reformer and a pragmatic compromiser, a tightly disciplined strategist and a loose-scheduled improviser, an inspiring leader and a disappointing deal-cutter.

If he is “to be as big a man as he can,” realizing not only his own vision of himself but the hopes that millions of Americans have placed in him, Clinton must overcome those apparent contradictions to master four challenges that presidential scholars place at the heart of presidential greatness:

--He must set clear, even simple goals, and stick to them even if that means risking himself in political battle.

--He must engage in a continuing dialogue with the country to convince voters that his ambitions should be realized.

--He must master Congress, which alone has the power to turn his proposals into real programs that deliver on his promises.

--He must be ready to improvise and correct course when his initial instincts turn out to be wrong.

“He has the potential to do very well,” said James David Barber, the Duke University political scientist who devised an oft-cited system for predicting presidents’ performances in office two decades ago. “He is a unifying outreacher.”

Barber said that Clinton will be an “active-positive” President: He wants to change things and he likes his job, attitudes he shares with Roosevelt, Kennedy--and Jimmy Carter.

Yet Barber, who dined with Clinton this month and admits to being his fan, also sees a pitfall in the new President’s unbounded enthusiasm for designing new policies and programs: He wants to do too much. “The danger is that he’ll lose concentration,” Barber warned. “He can’t do everything at once.”

In the days just ahead, the new President must distinguish more clearly between the core of his ambitious agenda and the periphery and explain to voters which is which. Otherwise, he will find his attention divided and his energy dissipated by battles over issues of secondary importance.

“Lyndon Johnson and Carter both had this problem,” said Samuel Kernell, a presidential scholar at UC San Diego. “Maybe you can fix the budget, reform health care and do campaign reform,” he added, citing three of Clinton’s priorities, “but you’ve got to spread them out.”

At one level, Clinton seems to recognize his problem. At a news conference last week, he promised to concentrate on “the big things.” When he began to list them, however, his impulse to embrace everything showed up as well. Revitalizing the economy, cutting the federal deficit, reforming the health care system--those were the top priorities, Clinton said. Then he added political campaign finance reform, and his own longtime interest in national service for young people. Plus foreign policy, he said, perhaps first of all.

“Too much,” warned Kernell. “Once he goes over four pieces of legislation, he should be asked why he’s spreading himself so thinly.”

Clinton’s often-remarked desire to please everyone--every voter, every constituency, every interest--could get him into trouble as well.

Early in the presidential campaign, he offered a centrist vision that made some of his aides wince: “We can be pro-growth and pro-environment, we can be pro-business and pro-labor, we can make government work again by making it more aggressive and leaner and more effective at the same time, and we can be pro-family and pro-choice.” The aides’ discomfort came because they knew that at some point President Clinton will have to make a decision that will disappoint one of those constituencies--and lead to feelings of betrayal.

The cure for that, Clinton replies, is what he calls “a constant dialogue with the country”--a continuous process of explaining the options and creating a national consensus.

It is a device that the Arkansas governor developed in part by sending his wife, Hillary, around the state for town meetings on education reform, producing a base of support for a tax increase to fund improvements in the public schools.

He used it again last month, convening hundreds of economists and business leaders in Little Rock, Ark., for a long public discussion of proposals for fixing the economy--proposals that Clinton himself already had explored but that he wanted to expose to the public.

And he is certain to use the device again, including the format of the televised “town meeting” that served him so well during the campaign.

“He’s very good at direct communication,” said Kernell. “We’ll get some real innovations in the way he addresses the American people.”

Thus the new President’s second task: maintaining his bond with the voters.

At a basic level, these techniques are merely improvements of the President’s power to seek national support for his ideas. Wilson used whistle-stop train tours, Franklin Roosevelt used “fireside chats” on the radio. Later presidents used televised speeches and news conferences.

Moreover, Clinton is accustomed to running for office constantly. Until 1986, he had a two-year term--meaning Clinton has campaigned for office more times than any President since Johnson. “His whole life is one long reelection campaign,” said John Brummett, who covered the governor for the Arkansas Gazette.

Congress tends to view any President’s consensus-building activities with suspicion, because he can “go over their heads to the people.”

Thus the new President’s third major job: finding a way to work productively with Congress. One of Carter’s flaws was that he disdained negotiating with the Legislature and, in return, his proposals were treated badly. Johnson’s greatest success, on the other hand, came in shepherding civil rights and anti-poverty laws to passage. Even Ronald Reagan succeeded on Capitol Hill, by stampeding the Democratic-controlled Congress in his first term when his popularity was high.

Clinton should adopt his strategy from Johnson rather than Reagan, Kernell suggested. “He has to sell his program on Capitol Hill. He has to give members of Congress political cover to support programs that ask people to sacrifice--something Congress can’t do without the President’s help.”

This is one lesson that Clinton knows already from his 12 years as governor of Arkansas. Legislators in Little Rock speak in awe-struck tones of his ability to round up votes, his frequent appearances in the lobbies of the state Legislature, even his occasional forays onto the floor of the Assembly to buttonhole a recalcitrant member.

The protocol of Congress will keep him from the floor of the House or Senate but Clinton made a point of visiting the leadership several times before Inauguration Day--and, as a result, his stock on Capitol Hill is high.

The new President’s fourth task, knowing when to change course, is harder than it looks--for the real trick is to be flexible without appearing irresolute.

Clinton has long been noted for his occasional malleability under pressure. He once vetoed a bill granting a tax break for college donations, heard a barrage of complaints from college presidents and dispatched a state police officer to get the bill back by fishing it out from under the legislative clerk’s door with a coat hanger.

And the most important moment in Clinton’s public life was a change of course: his decision to moderate his reformist message after the voters of Arkansas turned him out of office in 1980. The defeated governor publicly apologized to the voters, got rid of his most radical aides, promised to concentrate on the fundamentals of economic development--and won his comeback handsomely in 1982.

Back in office, Clinton practiced the art of the possible--disappointing some liberals and reformers by working closely with the state’s biggest business interests, moderating environmental regulations that would have burdened the chicken industry, relying on regressive sales taxes and fees to fund state programs.

The result was a record of practical accomplishment--plus the nickname of “Slick Willie,” stuck on by a newspaper editor who bristled at Clinton’s habit of seeming to agree with both sides of an issue.

Even last week, Clinton was wrestling with the task of adjusting course, as he explained why his campaign promise of a middle-class tax cut had disappeared.

“It would be irresponsible for any President of the United States ever not to respond to changing circumstances,” he said. “Every President . . . and especially the ones who really did a good job . . . had to change some of their positions in response to changing circumstances.”