CLINTON AIDES TRY TO REVERSE SPIN ON COMMENT.

Byline: Associated Press 

The White House shifted into a political damage-control mode Wednesday after President Clinton was quoted as saying he would not make recapturing Congress for the Democrats a major goal of his 1996 campaign.

White House press secretary Mike McCurry labored to explain that Clinton did not mean to suggest he would shy away from asking Americans to elect fellow Democrats.

"That's not at all what . . . he intended to convey," McCurry said. Clinton was trying, instead, to make the point that "simply using party labels is self-defeating. What counts is to put forward a vision that can elect everybody together," McCurry said.

Besides, the spokesman added, "there's not much evidence . . . that presidents have coattails." Indeed, Clinton's 1994 crusade to keep Congress in the hands of Democrats was a dramatic failure, with the GOP capturing control of both houses for the first time in four decades.

The latest episode was triggered by a Washington Post interview with the president.

Asked if he would implore voters to give him a Democratic Congress to help accomplish his second-term goals, Clinton told the newspaper: "The American people don't think it's the president's business to tell them what ought to happen in the congressional elections."

He said there's not much evidence that such appeals are successful.