CLINTON CAMPAIGN FOCUSING ON WOMEN : ANALYSIS.

Byline: Alison Mitchell The New York Times

President Clinton's decision to dramatize his veto of a bill banning a type of late-term abortion with tearful testimony from women who had undergone the procedure represented a calculation by the White House that it needed to put a human face on a potentially damaging issue.

But the careful choreography of the veto Wednesday showed something more: the attention the Clinton administration is paying to women, who it believes could very well decide the outcome of the presidential election.

Democrats say women may be the ``angry white men'' of this election cycle. Recent polls show President Clinton is leading the presumed Republican nominee, Senate majority leader Bob Dole of Kansas, precisely because of strong support among women.

The most recent New York Times/CBS News Poll, for example, showed that while men split 45 percent to 45 percent between Clinton and Dole, women favor Clinton 52 percent to 34 percent.

``This is a very wide gender gap, and if it is this wide by November there isn't a way in the world that Bob Dole can win,'' said Curtis Gans, the director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a nonpartisan group that studies voting patterns.

In June, the Clinton administration set up an Office of Women's Initiatives and Outreach to help keep the White House focused on how issues affect women, to send presidential appointees across the country to address groups of women and to tell women about how their government can serve them.

The office is headed by Betsy Myers, whose sister Dee Dee Myers is Clinton's former press secretary.

A similar, more overtly political effort is under way at the Clinton-Gore campaign headquarters, where Stephenie Foster is director of women's outreach. Officials there meet every month with a women's kitchen cabinet of advisers and hold weekly strategy sessions with women in the administration.

The Democrats also are planning a major push in 10 states to encourage women who are occasional voters to go to the polls this year. The effort is in partnership with Emily's List, a fund-raising organization that backs Democratic female candidates who favor abortion rights.

In the process, the White House has tried to frame campaign issues in ways that will appeal to women. For example, much of the White House's emphasis on children's issues - television violence, teen-age smoking, school uniforms - is designed to appeal to mothers.

Abortion can be a particularly tricky issue, however, even as it energizes the single-issue voter on both sides of the debate and produces get-out-the-vote troops.

A New York Times/CBS News Poll taken this month found that 37 percent of those surveyed said abortion should be available for those who want it; 41 percent said abortion should be available but under stricter limits, and 21 percent thought abortion should not be permitted.

The abortion procedure that Congress voted to outlaw is performed only at 20 weeks of gestation. Its opponents describe the procedure as a gruesome ``partial-birth'' abortion in which the fetus is partly extracted feet first and its brain is drained through a suction tube to allow the head to pass through the birth canal.

Opponents of the ban argue that the procedure is safer for women than other methods of performing abortions relatively late in pregnancy.