CLINTON PONDERS STRATEGIC MOVE TO SHOW TOUGH-ON-CRIME STANCE.

Byline: Linda Greenhouse The New York Times

The quadrennial judge-bashing season was proceeding nicely, as Republican presidential challengers outdid one another in their professed eagerness to save the country from liberal judges, when the Clinton administration suddenly did the unexpected. It stepped on the Republicans' lines.

The White House raised the possibility of asking for the resignation of Judge Harold Baer Jr. of the Southern District of New York if the judge does not see his way clear to overturning an evidentiary ruling that allowed a suspected drug dealer to go free.

By making clear its disapproval of the ruling by Baer - whom Clinton named to the bench less than two years ago - the administration no doubt hoped for a neat pre-emptive strike that would keep the judge from becoming the negative icon of 1996, as Willie Horton had been in the 1992 campaign.

The refusal of Michael D. McCurry, the White House press secretary, to rule out the possibility that Clinton might seek Judge Baer's resignation drew sharp criticism from bar leaders as a threat to judicial independence.

Late Friday, with the criticism mounting and threatening to engulf the administration's desired message that it, too, was tough on crime, the White House made public a letter from Jack Quinn, counsel to the President, to Rep. Bill McCollum of Florida, one of several House Republicans who earlier this month had asked Clinton to call for Baer's resignation.

While "the president has made clear that he believes Judge Baer's decision is grievously wrong," the letter states, "the proper way for the executive branch to contest judicial decisions with which it disagrees is to challenge them in the courts, exactly as the Clinton administration is doing in this case."

"The president supports the independence of the federal judiciary, which is established by the Constitution," the letter continues. "Although comments in recent press reports may have led some to conclude otherwise, the president believes strongly that the issues now before Judge Baer should be resolved in the courts."

Its brief trajectory notwithstanding, this incident could well have an undesired effect: not cooling the politically charged discourse on Federal judges, but rather, helping to enshrine them as the hapless poster children of the current election year.

But it is a risk the administration has evidently decided to take in response to what one White House official called the "tyranny of the anecdote" strategy that has worked well for Republican candidates in the past who have tried to tar Democrats as soft on crime. The best defense of its own record on judges, the administration has decided, is to attack the other party's, in a kind of "your judges are softer on crime than our judges" tit for tat that raises the question of whether any judicial nomination can possibly be considered on its merits for the foreseeable future, no matter who wins the election.

In response to reports that Republicans are combing the records of Clinton judicial appointees for any embarrassing, pro-defendant rulings, Administration lawyers are compiling their own lists of judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush who have had the temerity to suggest legalizing narcotics, raised questions about the government's "war on drugs," or blocked the implementation of laws enabling residents of local communities to learn the whereabouts of onetime sex offenders.

The administration's response comes after months of stump speeches by candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, including Patrick J. Buchanan, who has attacked the federal judiciary as a "dictatorship" and called for ending life tenure for judges, and Sen. Bob Dole, who has made the promise to appoint conservative judges a cornerstone of his campaign. "In a Dole administration, liberal judges need not apply," the Senate majority leader says in his speeches.

That the Clinton administration evidently feels itself vulnerable to such campaign speeches strikes some liberal Democrats as highly paradoxical, because they have spent much of the past three years complaining that liberals need not apply for Clinton judgeships, either.

"There's no reason for the administration to engage in a discussion that is such a threat to judicial independence," one of those liberal critics, Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a coalition of public-interest law firms and liberal interest groups, said in an interview Friday.

"This administration from the beginning has chosen the path of least resistance. They have avoided controversy. They have avoided appointing anyone with a public record. They have stepped away at the slightest criticism."

Indeed, 40 percent of the 53 judges named by the Administration in 1995 are former prosecutors.