Main Issue, Options Clear as Race Enters Stretch Run : Presidency: With the struggling economy on minds of most voters, they must decide to trust or change.

WASHINGTON — As the final leg of the 1992 presidential contest gets off to its traditional Labor Day start, the campaign’s main issue and the fundamental choice confronting voters both seem clear.

The issue is the stagnant economy. The choice boils down to trust versus change--trust President Bush to make the best of things, or bet on Democrat Bill Clinton to change them.

Skirmishes between the two men have broken out throughout the summer, but the struggle shifted into high gear this holiday weekend. Bush on Saturday launched a three-day campaign jaunt that takes him to seven states and includes visits to a pancake breakfast, an apple pageant and a Polish festival.

The President’s goal both on this and upcoming trips is to cast himself as the nation’s tried and true helmsman while warning that the course charted by Clinton would send the ship of state crashing onto the rocks.

Clinton, meanwhile, was buoyed by a double-digit lead in many national polls as he traveled Saturday to South Carolina. His itinerary through the holiday weekend included stops at contrasting but revered symbols of the middle America whose support he is trying to win back for his party--a visit today to the Southern 500 stock car race in Darlington, S.C., and an appearance Monday in Independence, Mo., birthplace of plain-spoken former President Harry S. Truman.

In the eight weeks left before Election Day, Clinton aims to continue to press his argument that most Americans can no longer bear the burden of Republican economic policies that, he claims, have throttled growth and fostered inequity.

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The challenger found new evidence for his argument last week with the release of a flurry of discouraging new economic statistics. One day brought confirmation that personal income in 1991 failed to keep pace with inflation, another saw reports of a sharp rise in the poverty rate and a dip in the purchasing power of the average American household. Finally, on the eve of the holiday weekend, came word that more than 167,000 private-sector jobs were cut from payrolls last month. Even with a surge in federally funded summer jobs, the net effect was a loss of 83,000 jobs.

The consequence of such statistics has been another set of dreary figures for the Bush Administration--polling data. A Gallup poll taken late last week showed the President trailing Clinton by 15 percentage points. A poll taken a few days earlier for Time magazine indicated a closer race, giving Clinton a 6-point lead nationwide. But ominously for Bush, the survey showed Clinton with big leads in several bellwether communities around the country--including Contra Costa County in Northern California--that usually are keys to who wins their respective states.

“People are not stupid,” says Paul Tully, the political director for the national Democratic Party. “Their daily lives are hitched up to a set of policies that have gone bad. Some voters have done better and some have stayed even. But a very large portion have fallen behind and they don’t see anyway that the next four years are going to be different.”

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It is because of the prolonged economic doldrums, says Bush campaign chairman Robert M. Teeter, that the President is “missing a piece” of the majority coalition that fueled three straight Republican presidential victories.

“Those are people who are truly swing voters, who are people that are very unhappy over the economy in the last year and a half or two years,” said Teeter.

Republicans believe these erstwhile supporters can be wooed back to the GOP banner, in part through the strategy of raising questions about Clinton.

Still, one advantage the Democrats enjoy this year is that the Electoral College playing field--which the GOP has dominated in most recent elections--has been leveled off by the economic slump.

The so-called Republican “lock” on the Electoral College was vividly demonstrated in the last three presidential elections, in which 38 states--including nearly every Southern one--voted for the party’s candidate in each contest. By itself, this core of GOP support provided Ronald Reagan in 1980 and ‘84, and Bush in ‘88, with far more than the 270 electoral votes needed for victory.

But this year, Republicans can take few states for granted, even in the South. Bush, for instance, felt compelled to campaign last Wednesday in his adopted home state of Texas and to travel to North Carolina on Saturday.

“The South is very competitive and Bush is on the defensive,” says political scientist Merle Black, a specialist in Southern politics. “Voters in the South don’t approve of how the President is handling the economy. And he hasn’t been very specific about how he is going to change things.”

With the nation’s economic problems as the backdrop, here is a look at how Bush and Clinton are likely to play out their arguments in 1992’s transformed national political landscape:

BUSH: Ordinarily, the powers of the presidency are a tremendous political asset for a chief executive seeking reelection. And Bush exploited that clout last week by approving subsidies for grain exports and the sale of jet fighters to Taiwan, moves that helped farmers and defense workers.

But when it comes to the overall state of the economy, Bush seems powerless. Most experts doubt that he can do anything to significantly improve economic conditions between now and Election Day. And this helps explain why his strategists are relying heavily on the trust issue in the contest against Clinton.

Bush will broach the trust question on both policy and personal grounds.

As campaign chairman Teeter explains it, the President will lay out his economic aims--lower taxes, cuts in federal spending, less government regulation--and say, in effect, “Look, I’m going to go down the right road economically,” while the path Clinton would travel “will end up making things worse.”

Beyond that, Teeter says, Bush will assert: “It not only matters what road you’re going down, it matters which guy do you trust to make the calls as you go along. Which of these two guys do you think has the stature and experience and integrity and whatever it takes to be President.”

This is an argument that clearly carries weight with some voters.

“I think Bush has been very consistent, and I don’t know that much about Clinton,” said Dave Coyle, an undecided voter who came to hear the President at a pancake breakfast Saturday in Painesville, Ohio.

In the effort to stir misgivings about Clinton, Bush strategists claim they will steer clear of the allegations of marital infidelity that cropped up against him earlier this year. But senior Bush campaign adviser Charles Black claims that the controversy over Clinton’s draft status, renewed last week by a Los Angeles Times story that reported evidence of an effort led by his now-deceased uncle to help Clinton avoid induction at the time of the Vietnam War, is considered “definitely in bounds.”

Clinton has disputed The Times story.

But Black says he and other GOP strategists believe Clinton “has a credibility problem” that stems in part from the lingering questions about the draft issue.

Republicans hope to intensify this problem by focusing on what they claim is a record on evasiveness and shifts by Clinton on other issues.

Says a senior White House official, “What you have is a pattern that fits a certain Southern populist tradition: ‘Say anything to anyone.’ If that hits and sticks, you have the image of someone you can’t trust.”

But whatever the doubts about Clinton, some Republicans believe their own candidate has to do more to make the trust issue relevant to American families battered by hard economic times. According to GOP pollster William McInturff, the President has to do a better job answering a key question: “What are you going to do to fix the economy.”

Many voters seem to agree.

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Barbara Clague, another undecided Ohio voter at the Painesville breakfast on Saturday, said that while she admires Bush’s experience, she is unconvinced he can solve the nation’s economic problems. “He’s going to have to do a little better; he’s going to have to give some specifics,” she said.

Bush strategists claim that this is just what he is prepared to do.

Bush pollster Fred Steeper says the President “is going to spell out how his policies will help small business and how Clinton’s will hurt small business; how his policies make more sense in terms of health care than Clinton’s do; that his proposal for school choice is what education needs.”

But even some of Bush’s own aides wonder how well the President will meet the challenge of getting his message across to the electorate.

“Presidents have different levels of skill doing different things,” says James Lake, Bush’s deputy campaign manager and a longtime aide to Reagan. “One of Reagan’s great skills was in communicating what he believed. George Bush doesn’t have that natural and trained skill. So we in the White House and the campaign have to help him communicate what he believes and what he stands for.”

CLINTON: The easiest part of the Arkansas governor’s job is to make the case for change. The harder task is to persuade voters that he is the man to lead the country into a new political and economic era.

Says Democratic strategist Tully: “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that when the polls show 75% of the country thinks the country is headed in the wrong direction that people are ready to make a change.”

Indeed, for a good many of those who came to cheer Clinton as he spoke on education issues at a college in a Maryland suburb outside Washington last week, the evidence of economic disarray is all they need to back Clinton.

“I think we need a new approach,” said Glenda Pollack, a medical secretary from Silver Spring, Md. “I don’t know how he’s going to go about things, but he’s a dynamic person and I have faith in him.”

But even Clinton aides concede that other voters will take more persuasion.

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“Most people have made up their minds they don’t want four more years of George Bush,” says Clinton pollster Stanley B. Greenberg. But, he adds, many voters are still not familiar enough with the candidate to have made a final decision to back him.

Ironically, one obstacle the Clinton campaign faces in responding to this challenge is, in a sense, self-created.

Driven by the memory of the failure of the 1988 Democratic nominee, Michael S. Dukakis, to respond to attacks that Bush made on him and his record as the governor of Massachusetts, the Clinton campaign has placed great emphasis on rebutting the charges the GOP has made against him, especially concerning his record in Arkansas.

But some analysts believe the counterattacks have been so frequent and vigorous that they distract attention from Clinton’s own proposals.

David Wilhelm, Clinton’s campaign manager, concedes that “there is some risk” involved in the counterattacks. But he adds: “Without responding to those initial charges, we would be unable to make the campaign about what we want it to be about.”

Thinking defensively, Clinton advisers are trying to protect their candidate against GOP attacks that arise from his proposals for $150 billion in tax increases and $200 billion in new federal spending over the next four years.

In an effort to dilute the charge that he is just another “tax and spend” liberal, Clinton’s brain trust hopes to get across the idea that he is a “different kind of Democrat,” one more willing to seek solutions at the state and local level or through the private sector.

Perhaps a more serious problem for Clinton in terms of casting himself as an agent of change is dealing with misgivings about his character.

Most Clinton supporters say they have put the allegations of personal misconduct out of their minds. “I don’t have any more doubts about him,” says Joan Kiely, who attended last week’s Maryland rally with her 2-year-old daughter. “I think Bush keeps his personal life under wraps, too.”

But some veterans of Democratic campaign wars fear that Clinton might be vulnerable to the Bush campaign’s efforts to raise doubts about him on the basis of his public performance.

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North Carolina labor leader Chris Scott, a longtime Democrat activist, says he worries that Clinton might be vulnerable on that front because his “persona is so much a politician, so much a guy with a 12-point program for everything.”

The Bush campaign, Scott predicts, “will pull 25 different trust strings--everything from the draft to overblown campaign promises. And if they keep pulling on those strings, (Clinton) could unravel.”

To prevent such damage, Scott says, it would help Clinton “to be a little bit spare in his answers, not try so hard to make everybody happy and try to answer the question, ‘What is the pain that will result from your program.?’ ”

Times staff writers Douglas Jehl, David Lauter and Doyle McManus contributed to this story.

Today on the Trail . . .

Bill Clinton campaigns in Florence, S.C., and Hot Springs, Ark.

President Bush campaigns in Louisville, Ky., Chicago and Michigan.

TELEVISION

Bush and Clinton will be interviewed on NBC News “The Brokaw Report,” at 7 p.m. PDT.