CLINTON OFFERS PLAN TO BOOST CHILD LITERACY.

Byline: Walter R. Mears Associated Press 

President Clinton parceled out another of his cautious proposals for a second term Friday. He said 100,000 students who are working their way through college with government help should serve as reading tutors for schoolchildren.

Campaigning in Georgia for the fourth time in the campaign year, the president stressed his middle-of-the-road ideas, saying that ``while the other side talked about being conservative,'' he's done something about problems like budget deficits and an overgrown government.

Later, in Macon, Ga., he told a crowd that swelled across a downtown intersection that they could ``hardly have a clearer choice'' than the one between his ticket and Bob Dole's.

``You have this huge choice,'' he said. ``Do you believe we're better off being told we're on our own, there is no `we the people?'

``. . . Or should we build a bridge to the 21st century we can all walk across together?''

As he has at other southern campaign stops, Clinton said his crime control program is working, ``but we're only halfway home'' and he needs another term to complete it.

``I say, yes, we've made progress with the `three strikes and you're out,' with the 100,000 police,'' he said. ``It's the right thing to do, but we've got to finish the job.''

At a rally in a downtown Atlanta park, Clinton ran through his litany of administration progress reports on crime, welfare reform, trimming federal bureaucracy and other fronts. As in every speech, he dismissed Dole's 15 percent tax-cut proposal as a scheme that would blow a hole in the federal deficit, down in each of his four years, he boasted.

``Forty percent of the 8-year-olds in America today still cannot read a book on their own,'' Clinton said, in briefly announcing his tutoring proposal. ``If they can't read, they can't succeed.''

Clinton urged, as he has before, that 1 million Americans volunteer to help in a drive for child literacy by the year 2000.

He said he wants an expansion of the work study program just approved by Congress to be used to that end. ``Today, I propose that 100,000 of those work study students join the `America Reads' initiative and make up 10 percent of those million volunteers we need.''

Gene Sperling, a Clinton economic adviser, called it ``a very smart and sound way for us to almost instantly create a battalion of 100,000 college students who could be the front lines'' of a literacy corps.