IT'S BEGINNING to look as if George Stephanopoulos bailed out too soon. Not that he needed a grueling year of defending President Clinton from Monica Lewinsky revelations and impeachment. But at the end of that harrowing road, Mr. Clinton is moving back toward the strategy of deferring to congressional Democrats that Mr. Stephanopoulos always supported -- with disastrous results.

Not that you'd get much sense of that from Mr. Stephanopoulos' alternately engaging and superficial memoir, "All Too Human." Gracefully written, frequently self-critical and mostly generous in spirit, the book is extremely insightful about the strain of working in the modern White House.

It's moderately insightful about Mr. Clinton's personality. (For all the furor about the author's alleged betrayal of Oval Office secrets, the president remains a surprisingly distant figure, possibly because by mid-1993 Mr. Stephanopoulos already felt exiled from his inner circle.)

But the book is virtually without insight about which of Mr. Clinton's policy and political choices worked -- and which didn't. Which is too bad, because Mr. Clinton is drifting again into the fundamental mistakes that derailed his first two years -- when he followed the advice of old-line Democrats such as Mr. Stephanopoulos.

Although he never owns up in the book, Mr. Stephanopoulos was a principal advocate of the legislative strategy that Mr. Clinton employed when he arrived in Washington.

The problem was that the congressional Democratic leadership -- especially in the House -- wasn't ready for the centrist reforms that Mr. Clinton promised in his 1992 campaign.

Old-line Democrats

House Democratic leaders -- usually supported by Mr. Stephanopoulos and other White House liberals -- resisted spending cuts in Mr. Clinton's initial budget (which pushed him to raise taxes more than he otherwise might); shelved campaign finance reform proposals that they thought would dilute their financial advantage; discouraged him from pursuing welfare reform (for fear of dividing Democrats); and accepted liberal amendments that poisoned Mr. Clinton's crime bill. All these decisions alienated swing voters -- and fueled the GOP landslide in 1994.

Mr. Clinton contributed to the disaster with his own missteps (gays in the military, an overreaching health care plan and shifting signals on taxes during the 1993 budget fight). But the president at least recognized the need to change course after 1994. Mr. Clinton learned a critical lesson after the deluge: If Democrats didn't take the lead on reforming government, they would leave open the door for Republicans to pursue much more sweeping reductions in Washington's role.

As the book makes clear, Mr. Stephanopoulos never accepted that lesson. He staunchly opposed Mr. Clinton's call for a balanced budget in 1995 -- even though that decision allowed Mr. Clinton to shift the debate from whether to eliminate the deficit to how to eliminate it, and proved the turning point in his presidency.

More tellingly, Mr. Stephanopoulos criticizes Mr. Clinton for signing the GOP-drafted welfare reform bill in 1996 -- without ever acknowledging that if he and other liberals had supported reform while Democrats controlled Congress, they could have drafted a bill much more to their liking.

The left's case

Ironically, even as Mr. Stephanopoulos is rehashing the left's case against Mr. Clinton, the president is now reverting to old habits. As if Mr. Stephanopoulos were still whispering into his ear, Mr. Clinton is again worrying more about mollifying his party than identifying it with the cause of reform.

The picture, as always with Mr. Clinton, isn't entirely black and white. The president is still challenging Democratic orthodoxy with an education reform package that demands tough accountability measures on local school districts -- such as new teacher testing and an end to social promotion.

But on Social Security and Medicare, his biggest decisions, he's ducking. Mr. Clinton has proposed to devote three-fourths of the federal budget surplus to Social Security and Medicare without demanding any specific cost-cutting reforms in return.

Short-run, this party-first political strategy keeps Mr. Clinton on the right side of Democratic legislators cool to entitlement reform and still unhappy about having to defend him from impeachment. It's also helping Vice President Al Gore minimize opposition on the left for his presidential bid in 2000.

Yet one overarching lesson of Mr. Clinton's presidency is that he cannot reinvigorate his party unless he's willing to accept internal conflict. For Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore, resisting entitlement reform poses at least some political danger -- it might help Republicans portray them in 2000 as big-spending defenders of an untenable status quo. The larger risk is the one that Mr. Stephanopoulos and his allies missed on welfare: If Democrats don't reform these programs today, they could cede the initiative for redesigning them to the GOP tomorrow.

Mr. Stephanopoulos says he left the White House partly because he believed Mr. Clinton's second term would be "complacent." In many ways (even leaving aside the obvious turmoil of impeachment), he was wrong.

Working with congressional Democrats, Mr. Clinton has been able to pack more activism (on initiatives such as expanding health care for uninsured children) into a balanced budget than the left expected. The complacency that threatens Mr. Clinton isn't the lack of new spending that Mr. Stephanopoulos feared; it's the reluctance to modernize core pillars of the welfare state that his former adviser would probably cheer.

Ronald Brownstein is a Los Angeles Times columnist.

Pub Date: 3/24/99