CLINTON, DOLE POINT FINGERS AS GRIDLOCK RETURNS TO CAPITOL.

Byline: Adam Clymer The New York Times

President Clinton and Sen. Bob Dole blamed each other Wednesday for gridlock in Congress, as senators from both parties clawed for maximum advantage on obvious election-year issues like raising the minimum wage and reducing the federal gasoline tax.

Clinton said the only fair way to ``break this logjam'' was for Republicans not to ``ruin these good bipartisan bills'' by adding special provisions to them. He said those add-ons were ``poison pills'' intended to invite vetoes so the Republicans could maintain that he opposed the basic bills.

``Let us treat these next three months as the end of the legislative session and not as the beginning of the election season,'' Clinton told a news conference where he warned Republicans against returning to a policy of ``extremism, deadlock and government shutdowns.''

Dole, the Senate majority leader and presumptive Republican presidential nominee, sarcastically welcomed Clinton's ``bipartisan or whatever statement on cooperation from Congress.''

But he said that if the president wanted bills passed, he should lean on Senate Democrats who were preventing votes.

Dole cited Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., the minority leader, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., whose efforts to force a vote on a minimum-wage increase, and Dole's equally dogged resistance, have tied up the Senate for weeks.

The Kansas senator also defended the longstanding congressional strategy of adding provisions Congress likes to bills the president favors, a strategy especially prevalent when the president and the congressional majority are of different parties.

He told a news conference that the provisions Republicans had added to bills, from changes in Medicaid financing on a welfare measure to tax cuts in a balanced-budget bill, were ``good medicine.''

All in all, the exchanges Wednesday underscored that gridlock had returned to the Capitol, and with it the prospect of renewed public disenchantment.

While the Senate took no action Wednesday, except to defeat an effort to limit debate on pending legislation, the House came closer than ever to a vote on increasing the minimum wage to $5.15 an hour from $4.25.

A Democratic effort to force a vote was defeated, but by only 10 votes. The 218-208 tally provided a narrower margin than in any of the previous four such efforts. Last week House Democrats lost by 219-203 on a similar procedural test intended to lead to a minimum-wage vote.

But Wednesday 14 Republicans, more than ever before, broke with their leaders on the issue.

The Senate has been unable to get even that close to a vote on the minimum wage. Democrats have sought to add a wage increase to various bills, but Dole has used an unusual parliamentary device to prevent any amendments except those germane to legislation. The Senate has no tradition, and ordinarily no rule, requiring such relevancy.

For the moment, though, Dole himself has combined three measures - the minimum-wage increase, repeal (for this year) of the 4.3-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax increase enacted three years ago and an obscure piece of labor legislation - in one grab-bag amendment to a bill that would pay legal expenses for dismissed employees of the White House travel office.

In an election year, the first two items amount to countervailing inevitability. Democrats have pushed the wage increase, and many Republicans are ready to vote for it. Republicans have pushed repeal of the gasoline tax increase, enacted as part of Clinton's 1993 deficit-reduction package, and most congressional Democrats would go along. Clinton said Wednesday that he would sign a repeal measure.

But the labor measure, known as the Team Act, is the issue. It would allow cooperative efforts between employees and management in circumstances that the National Labor Relations Board has ruled now violate the law by going around unions.

Republican proponents say the legislation would promote workplace cooperation on issues like safety or productivity; Democrats, and organized labor, see it as a way of allowing management to choose compliant workers, instead of union representatives, to talk to.

Clinton on Wednesday called the measure a ``poison pill of undermining workers' rights.''

Dole recalled that in the State of the Union message, the president said, ``When companies and workers work as a team, they do better - and so does America.''

The senator said the real opposition to the bill came from unions, because if workers on their own could meet with management, ``it might occur to the employee that he or she doesn't need a labor boss.''

``This is all about power,'' Dole said. ``It's not about politics. It's about power. It's about contributions'' from unions to Democrats.

``It seems to us that we've got an issue here now,'' the senator said, plainly preferring to challenge ``labor bosses'' rather than argue about the minimum wage. He also found another foil, repeatedly denouncing the ``liberal media,'' which, he said, never use the word ``gridlock'' when it is Democrats who are doing the delaying.