NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Must Now Choose Big Gambles or Safe Bets : Agenda: Host of decisions will test the new President’s sometimes-bold, sometimes-cautious nature.

WASHINGTON — In 1782, with the Revolution safely won, Congress took a moment to adopt a design for the Great Seal of the United States and with it a motto for the nation still to be created: Novus ordo seclorum --A New Age Now Begins.

The abiding myth of America is of a land forever young, a people unfettered by history, a nation always in the process of becoming. And President Clinton, like many of his predecessors, invoked that spirit Wednesday as he stood under a bright winter sun to deliver his inaugural address.

“Today, we celebrate the mystery of American renewal,” he said. “A spring reborn in the world’s oldest democracy that brings forth the vision and courage to reinvent America.”

But the challenge Clinton faces, as he descends from the loftiness of rhetoric to the unforgiving reality of decision-making, is to reconcile the soaring hopes for change that he labored to raise with the often-narrow scope of what he actually intends to do.

And the gap between Clinton’s rhetoric and his proposals reflects more than just the usual difference between the poetry of campaigning and the prose of government. In Clinton’s case, the split also reflects two sides of his character--the orator and the administrator.

Part of the fascination of the man who has now ascended to the nation’s most powerful office lies in his duality. George Bush lived and governed as an uncomplicated man. Neither reflective nor given to self-doubt or dreams, Bush pursued his steady course of prudence. Faced with threatening domestic problems, the nation quickly grew tired of him.

Clinton could hardly be more different. At once gregarious and intensely private, cocksure and possessed of doubt, principled yet expedient, he is a cautious gambler, a careful revolutionary.

In his campaign speeches, Clinton often painted his themes in bold primary colors. His national service program would “educate a whole generation of Americans” by allowing them to pay back loans through public service jobs. His urban policy proposals would do no less than bring back the spirit of enterprise to the inner city, he suggested.

His health care plans would guarantee access while controlling costs, all the while not sacrificing quality.

But the actual proposals more often than not are turning out to be drawn in pastels. For example, the national service plan, due to budgetary constraints, will accommodate only a fraction of America’s students. And it will allow them to pay back only some, not all, of their loans.

Similarly, Clinton’s urban plans will be small-scale experiments, at least to start with. The health plan, Vice President Al Gore said recently, could take six to eight years to phase in.

As a candidate, Clinton occasionally joked about this split in his personality. Late one night, as his plane flew from Orange County to Las Vegas, he walked back among the reporters sitting in the rear of the aircraft.

“Yes, we’re going to take bold steps into the future. Bold, dramatic, big steps,” he loudly proclaimed, all the while mincing down the aisle with exaggeratedly tiny baby steps.

As President, Clinton will have to resolve the contradiction.

In each of the five areas that he has identified as the “pillars” of his term--reviving the economy, shrinking the deficit, rebuilding the health care system, reforming the political system and creating a national service program--he faces a basic choice of whether to go for the bold stroke and risk a grave reversal, or go the cautious, conservative route and risk frittering away the spirit of newness that gives each President a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

On the deficit, for example, will he propose the sort of politically dangerous tax increases or cuts in popular entitlement programs needed to move the budget toward balance? Or will he fudge the point?

On political reform, will he seriously try to close the money pipeline that connects large special interests with members of Congress? Or will he decide to avoid a potentially bruising fight with those on Capitol Hill and settle for more modest forms of campaign reform?

From the outset of his presidency, Clinton has institutionalized the split in his own mind between boldness and caution.

His staff includes many of the “new ideas” thinkers who helped craft the soaring themes of his campaign. But he has surrounded them with far more careful administrative types, including several who served in several of the former Arkansas governor’s administrations, which were marked by compromise and what critics called a lowest-common-denominator search for consensus.

Many Clinton advisers are openly rooting for the grand gesture.

“The bolder Clinton is, the more acceptable the tough choices will be,” argued Clinton’s campaign pollster, Stanley B. Greenberg. “A bold context gives degrees of freedom not otherwise available.”

Greenberg said he believes that the underlying message of the 1992 election was that voters hunger for evidence that their government is still capable of action--any action--to address the nation’s problems.

If Clinton offers voters something that can inspire their hopes, he says, they will support him even if the specifics are something they might otherwise be loath to accept.

But others emphasize the risks of trying to do too much, noting that Clinton won election with only 43% of the vote and that American attitudes toward change are far more ambivalent than the campaign might have indicated.

Neither side in that debate really knows which way the new President will turn. Even in his inaugural speech, Clinton sought to split the difference. “Thomas Jefferson,” he said, nodding to one of his heroes, “believed that to preserve the very foundations of our nation, we would need dramatic change from time to time.”

Clinton’s paraphrase toned down Jefferson’s actual words in a revealing manner. For Jefferson spoke in terms far more definitive than “dramatic change.”

“I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing,” Jefferson wrote. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

As orator, Clinton harked in his campaign and his inaugural address to some of the oldest and most powerful traditions of American political rhetoric. From the earliest days of the European settlement of the Americas, this was the “New World”--the land of endless possibility.

In choosing a motto for the new nation’s official seal, Congress adopted a phrase from Virgil’s Eclogues--”A New Age Now Begins,” in a free translation by historian Page Smith that seeks to convey the spirit and intent of the Founding Fathers, though a more literal rendering might be “A New Order of the Ages.”

Presidents, particularly at their inaugurations, have sought to tap into that vision, to present themselves as embodiments of the hopes Americans have for their futures.

Those who succeed cloak themselves in an armor that, at least for a time, can deflect the strongest political blows--for if the President can stake a claim to embodying “change,” then to oppose the President is to set oneself against the American spirit.

Yet the tradition of disappointed voters turning against their former champions is equally strong. And Clinton, as much as any leader in recent memory, focused his campaign on the need for fundamental, far-reaching change.

“We’ve been given a chance, not a mandate,” Clinton campaign strategist James Carville said Wednesday.