Edition: U.S. / Global

THE NATION;It's All in the Ear of the Beholder

Published: January 28, 1996

THE President stood at the rostrum of the House of Representatives, supporting a tax credit for families with children, and outlining five goals for the American people, from raising the standard of living to preserving natural resources.

"We are determined that every citizen of this nation shall have an equal right and equal opportunity to grow in wisdom and in stature and to take his place in the control of his nation's destiny," the President said.

The President stood at the rostrum of the House of Representatives, supporting a tax credit for families with children, and outlining seven challenges for the American people, from raising the minimum wage to preserving the environment.

"Our goal must be to enable all our people to make the most of their own lives with stronger families, more educational opportunity, economic security, safer streets, a cleaner environment and a safer world," the President said.

The first President was Harry S. Truman, in his 1948 State of the Union address, at the beginning of his comeback election year. The second was Bill Clinton at the beginning of what he hopes will be his own comeback last week.

The Annual Ritual

Their situations are different. But their similar sentiments show a truth of modern American political ritual: Presidents come and Presidents go, but the State of the Union speech just keeps rolling along.

"It's a big old showboat going down the river," said Peggy Noonan, who helped write her share of speeches for Ronald Reagan in the 1980's. "It's not the fastest thing, or the prettiest, but when it's going by, everybody stops and watches."

Yet the speech has become remarkable not nearly so much for what is said as for how it is heard, and how it projects against the landscape. And it is heard and seen very differently from year to year.

For example, the laundry list of priorities in Mr. Clinton's hourlong speech last Tuesday -- which was generally praised -- was nearly identical to the list in his 81-minute marathon of last year -- which was panned by the pundits, though not the public. In both, he called for overhauling welfare and campaign finance laws, consolidating Federal job training programs, restoring civility and cracking down on teen-age pregnancy and violence in the media, often in nearly the same words.

So what was the difference, besides 20 minutes? The biggest was that Mr. Clinton's political fortunes have revived a good deal in the last 12 months, even as those of the Republican Congress have stalled.

Yet the President's very repetition also shows the limits of his power. He recited his agenda for the umpteenth time in part because so much of it remains unachieved at the hands of hostile Congresses (Republican and Democratic).

Then, too, in an age of increasingly short attention spans, repetition is good politics. The White House assumes that hardly anyone remembers the details of last year's speech, and it knows that this year's was the last time that Mr. Clinton will have such a purely Presidential platform before the campaign begins in earnest. So he took his best shot replaying his greatest hits; the line about violence in the media was one of the highest-scoring sections in public opinion surveys after the speech last year, so why not give it another whirl?

The Constitution merely requires that the President report annually to Congress, not that he do so in person, and Thomas Jefferson began a century-long tradition of sending only written messages. But Woodrow Wilson, the professor-turned-politician and master rhetorician, revived the personal appearance in 1913, and the custom has been followed by every President since. Offering Great Thoughts

The State of the Union has been used for great statecraft. James Monroe used one of his to announce the Monroe Doctrine, warning European powers to keep their hands off the Americas. Theodore Roosevelt used his first to launch his campaign against rapacious big business.

But more often, in the modern era, the address has been the occasion for dutiful enumeration of priorities. In the television era, the occasion has become something else: the single most splendid setting (outside the inaugural) for displaying the President in all his Presidentiality. As such, it is seldom a speechwriter's dream.

"I always regarded it as something of a chore," said Theodore C. Sorenson, who labored on President Kennedy's. "It seems to have substantially evolved as a ritual from where it was 35 years ago, with the clearest change being the gimmickry of having a hero seated in the gallery with the First Lady, which began with Reagan. I guess it's high drama, but whether it adds to the dignity, I don't know."

Mr. Sorenson said Mr. Clinton's deftest trick was to borrow Republican notions on crime and values, then embrace them with his own caveats so as to make them his own. "It made it clear that the Clinton position was not a difference in objective or principle so much as it was a difference in methods and means," Mr. Sorenson said, "and the public's increasingly coming around to his point of view."

Ms. Noonan, as befits a Republican, gave the President points for trying, but mostly dismissed the speech as remarkable for its unremarkability.

"Last year's State of the Union was actually historically bad," she said. "This time, he came on, he kept himself to an hour, and he kept himself together and he seemed to stay with his text. And he seemed, God bless him, if no one else had faith in what he was saying, he had faith in it."

"It'll go into the big books of State of the Union addresses," she predicted, "and history will never again refer to it."

Photo: Cheering Democrats, left, and subdued Republicans, right, playedtheir roles in the annual State of the Union ritual. (Photographs by Paul Hosefros/The New York Times)