Balanced Budget Still Possible, Says President But Legal Troubles Have Put His Own Finances Near Bankruptcy

President Clinton defended his wife Hillary from Republican attacks and confirmed Thursday that legal bills have brought him to the brink of bankruptcy.

But in a far-ranging news conference, he also tried to woo his GOP antagonists back to the negotiating table to cut a balanced-budget deal.

Clinton insisted that the two sides are tantalizingly close to a seven-year balanced budget plan. And while Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole also held out hope Thursday for an agreement when the two sides return to the negotiating table next week, House Speaker Newt Gingrich voiced pessimism again.

Gingrich, during a news conference in Seattle, called the president’s remarks “very, very disappointing” and accused him of playing a “political game.”

“I’m prepared to negotiate seriously,” Gingrich told reporters while in the midst of a nationwide fund-raising tour for Republican lawmakers. “But if we’re going to negotiate seriously, let’s start with the facts, and let’s not just make up political phrases.”

“We are not that far apart on the money,” the president said at his White House news conference, adding that the two sides are arguing now over less than 2 percent of the spending in a seven-year plan aimed at erasing the deficit by 2002.

“The differences in dollars are not as different now as some of the differences in policy,” Clinton said.

Although both sides have agreed on some $600 billion in savings, the policy differences that remain represent ideological gulfs that define and divide the two parties on issues such as tax cuts, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare reform and the size and function of the federal government.

Clinton urged the GOP to drop its ideological gloves, join with him in approving a plan and agree to take the policy differences - over what the federal role should be in welfare and Medicare and other issues - to the voters in next November’s election.

“We’re not that far apart. If the objective is balancing the budget and giving an appropriate tax cut, we are not that far apart,” Clinton said. “We ought to resolve the policy issues we can resolve and put the ones we can’t to the side. There will be plenty of things to argue about in the election season.”

Clinton had some kind words to say about Gingrich’s brand of leadership.

“They’ve held together pretty well,” the president said of House Republicans. “You have to give him credit for that. … I think he has a strong hand there.”

And Dole joined Clinton on the rhetorical high road, saying a balanced budget deal is still possible. Campaigning at a South Carolina chemical plant, Dole - like Clinton - said Republican leaders and the president have fundamental policy differences that have prevented them from coming together.

“That’s what 1996 is all about,” Dole said.

Clinton was restrained, but un yielding, when the questions turned to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role in the Whitewater scandal and the flap over the 1993 firing of the White House travel office. He declined to rule out the possibility that the first lady may yet choose to appear before the Senate Whitewater Committee to confront her Republican critics.

“Whatever is necessary to fully answer the questions - she will do,” Clinton said.

Clinton likened his wife’s experience with her critics to the way Eleanor Roosevelt drew fire from the GOP foes of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

“I think she’s done a fine job. I may have asked her to do more than anybody should ever have been asked to do when I asked her to undertake the health care effort,” Clinton said, “but there are worse things than wanting every American child to have health care coverage, just the way every child in every other advanced country in the world has.

“When it comes to the whole Whitewater issue, the allegations … virtually always bore no relationship to the facts,” Clinton said. “An allegation comes up, and we answer it. And people say, ‘Here’s another allegation. Answer this. And her’s another allegation. Answer this.’

“An allegation is not the same thing as a fact.

And he said legal bills stemming from Whitewater investigations and a sexual harassment lawsuit have drained 20 years of his family’s savings - as reported in the new issue of Money magazine.

“I’ve never added it all up, but that’s probably right,” the president said.

On Thursday, Money said that the Clintons’ net worth, which had approached $697,000 in July 1992, is now nearing zero and that the couple was “on a collision course with bankruptcy.” Clinton earns $200,000 a year as president.

The Clintons face legal bills from the Whitewater investigations and a sexual harassment suit brought by former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones against Clinton for actions when he was governor.

A private legal defense fund has been established to help pay the bills. But as of mid-1995, the fund received $865,871, while bills have topped $2.1 million.

The president said taxpayers won’t pay any of his legal bills “because I’m not a target of the (Whitewater) investigation.”

“… I didn’t run for this office for the money,” Clinton said. “And I feel badly that - that 20 years of our hard effort in savings may go away.

“I feel a lot worse about all the innocent people who work here who don’t make particularly high salaries … that had to hire lawyers and pay legal fees too,” Clinton said.

Clinton is scheduled to leave for Bosnia today.