NEWS ANALYSIS : Uncertainties Hang Over Bush, Clinton Camps

WASHINGTON —  These days, the presidential campaign has the feel of a battlefield on the night before an offensive. Everyone knows hostilities will escalate soon--but no one except the generals knows exactly when, and no one at all knows which side will suffer most before they conclude.

Nearly six weeks before Election Day, the campaigns of Bill Clinton and President Bush both seem embattled and uncertain. Neither side appears entirely confident of the ground beneath its feet.

On the surface, the presidential race has settled into a stable pattern: Since early September most national polls have shown Democrat Clinton holding 51% to 55% of the vote, and President Bush mired around 40%, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.

That’s an exceedingly strong position for a challenger, especially a Democrat. When Clinton hit 53% in a Gallup survey completed Sept. 11, it marked a historic milestone: In the history of the Gallup Poll, dating back to 1936, the only Democratic candidate ever to poll that high in mid-September was Lyndon B. Johnson en route to his landslide win over Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Even Franklin D. Roosevelt wasn’t that high at this point in 1936, 1940 or 1944, says Larry Hugick, the managing editor of the Gallup Poll.

But the Clinton team’s confidence in that lead has been tempered by the fear that more revelations are looming about his efforts to avoid service in Vietnam. When Clinton advisers pick up the phone to talk to a reporter, an anxious note infuses their inevitable first question: Is there anything new coming out on the draft? They’re bracing for Bush ads--expected imminently--attacking Clinton’s responses on the issue as dishonest.

Bush officials find considerable solace in the Clinton camp’s anxiety about the draft controversy. But they are wrestling with great uncertainties of their own, particularly the fear that the resounding silence that greeted the President’s new economic plan means that many voters have already closed the book on Bush--no matter what he says.

“You could have that psychology going on,” said one senior Bush campaign official. “But I can’t buy into that. It’s just dysfunctional for me to buy into that at this moment.”

Looming over all these uncertainties is the man who has elevated unpredictability to an art form: Ross Perot. Perot has already shuffled the cards in the presidential race twice--once by announcing he would enter the race if volunteers placed him on the ballot in all 50 states, and a second time by announcing he would not.

Now he seems to be edging back toward declaring his candidacy--if only, he says, to ensure an airing for his views on how to cut the federal budget deficit. That prospect has sent the strategists and pundits back to their maps and computers, trying to divine the unknowable: how big a protest vote the Texas billionaire could draw and whether it would hurt Bush or Clinton more.

At the moment, though, the prospect of Perot Redux is still a distant imponderable for two campaigns grappling with more immediate riddles.

For Clinton, the most pressing problem is finding a way to dispel the cloud of draft-related questions over his campaign.

The current round of interrogation began on Sept. 2, when the Los Angeles Times reported that Clinton’s uncle, Raymond Clinton, had lobbied extensively to help him avoid being drafted. When the story was released, Clinton told reporters that the revelations--including news that his uncle had secured for him a billet in the Navy reserves--was “all news to me.”

A few days later, his campaign acknowledged he had been informed about the Navy offer last spring; Clinton insisted his response referred to the broader question of his uncle’s efforts, not the specific offer of the naval position, and that in any event he didn’t know about the naval billet at the time.

Since that dust-up, Clinton has been buffeted by a steady barrage of Republican attacks on the issue, articles in the press examining the evolution of his account and modest new wrinkles in the story that have provided grist for further questions from reporters.

So far, Clinton aides insist, their polling and focus groups show no damage from the issue; but they are watching the numbers like a doctor concerned that a low-grade fever might suddenly spike to life-threatening heights. Their anxiety is certain to intensify when Bush finally launches his ads attacking Clinton, probably on the draft and taxes. “Nobody knows quite how it is going to play,” admits one Clinton adviser.

At the least, the draft issue has functioned like sand in the gears of Clinton’s campaign machine. His eagerness to avoid new questions on the issue has forced him to curtail his access to the press; even so, these last two weeks, the three-way fencing match between Clinton, the GOP and the press on the controversy has overshadowed almost anything else he has done.

On Saturday, for instance, questions about the draft dominated a Little Rock, Ark., press conference at which Clinton was endorsed by retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

For Clinton’s campaign, the greatest uncertainty is the prospect that some new fact will cause voters to reconsider positive assessments of their candidate. For Bush’s campaign, the greatest uncertainty is whether anything will cause voters to reconsider negative assessments of their candidate.

For many Republicans, the muted public response to Bush’s revised economic plan, released on Sept. 10 in Detroit, has demonstrated the depth of skepticism about his priorities after four years of dismal economic performance. Bush finally delivered the sweeping statement of his economic principles that critics have long clamored for--and virtually nothing happened.

“It’s a credibility problem,” said one senior Administration official. “People don’t believe Bush is going to do it. People believe the speech is a campaign document, not a governing document--and that’s crippling.”

To reverse that verdict, some Republican activists believe that Bush may eventually be compelled to demonstrate his commitment in more tangible ways--such as convincing Chief of Staff James A. Baker III to announce that he will remain in the White House for a second term to direct implementation of the President’s economic ideas.

Others aren’t sure there is anything the President can do to regain the trust of voters who lost faith in him after he broke his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge from 1988. In the Washington Post on Saturday, veteran Republican pollster Richard Wirthlin memorably called those “the six most damaging words in the history of politics.”

The fact that both candidates are so vulnerable to attacks on their credibility virtually guarantees they will spend the next few weeks trying to jab open the other’s wounds. (Clinton on Sunday released an ad ridiculing Bush’s economic record--the general election’s first negative ad.) And that introduces another uncertainty, centered on Perot.

It’s worth remembering one key reason for Perot’s popularity in the first place: Many voters disdained both Clinton and Bush. Those feelings have abated somewhat, particularly in Clinton’s case. But after several weeks of televised warfare between Clinton and Bush, Republican pollster Bill McInturff says, it’s quite possible that by mid-October, each candidate may be viewed negatively by more than 40% of the public.

That kind of dissatisfaction could make a certain diminutive billionaire look much more attractive than today. That is, of course, if exasperation with Perot’s mixed signals about his intentions doesn’t first alienate everyone but his hard-core supporters.

That’s one last uncertainty in a season suddenly blossoming with them.

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in Chicago and East Lansing, Mich.

President Bush addresses the United Nations General Assembly and campaigns in New York City.