CLINTON TAKES BUDGET BATTLE TO NASHVILLE.

Byline: Alison Mitchell The New York Times

Before hundreds of cheering truck assembly-line workers Friday in a state important to his re-election hopes, President Clinton called his budget battle with the Republican majority in Congress a choice between a vision of "a society where winner takes all or a society where everybody's got a chance to win."

In back-to-back appearances at the Peterbilt Truck Factory and a Democratic fund-raising lunch, Clinton and Vice President Al Gore provided a taste of how they might take the budget theme to the hustings if the November elections become a referendum on the two parties' competing visions for shaping the federal government.

Impassioned, folksy and quoting lines from a country-western music song in the city that is home to the Grand Ole Opry, Clinton returned to some of the economic themes that had characterized his first race for president in 1992 - an emphasis on the needs of the middle class.

"We want to grow the middle class and strengthen the underclass," Clinton said. "We think the best way to make more millionaires is to have more successful working people buying what they're putting out, whether they're products or services."

Gore, returning to his home state, where Republicans captured the governorship and both Senate seats two years ago, called Republican prescriptions "an extremist agenda" and tied them to the "trickle-down economics" of the Reagan administration.

And going on the offensive on the Whitewater controversy, he accused the Republicans of practicing "character assassination" on Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first lady, because they cannot "make any progress talking about the issues Americans care about."

Clinton left Nashville at midday on an overnight flight to Bosnia, where he planned to meet today with U.S. troops stationed in Tuzla as part of the peacekeeping mission.

He also plans to tour U.S. military staging areas in Hungary and Italy and to meet with the presidents of Bosnia and Croatia.

Clinton asked the truck-factory workers to applaud three of their co-workers who had been sent to Germany in National Guard units called up to provide support for the deployment of U.S. troops to Bosnia.

"We have worked hard, not to fight a war but to win a peace, for the humanitarian reasons that involved the people there," Clinton said, "and to keep that war from spreading in ways that could hurt the United States and our friends and allies in Europe."

Clinton's two stops in Nashville, however, focused mainly on campaign-style appeals for support in Washington's budget fight.

Describing the 50 hours of face-to-face negotiations he had with the Republican Congressional leaders, Clinton said the talks had often reminded him of the lyrics of a country-western song: "It's hard to soar like an eagle when I'm stuck with a turkey like you."

Drawing hoots of laughter, Clinton added: "Sometimes they think that about me. Sometimes I think that about them."

The president's appearances came while Congress was taking a short recess and both sides were maneuvering for advantage in the budget standoff, either to force a deal or to prepare for a threatened, long-term political battle during the November elections.Clinton hit the road just a day after he declared during a news conference that he was optimistic a budget deal could be reached "if we set aside partisanship and work to seize this moment."

More than a quarter of the 1996 fiscal year has already passed without a budget agreement, and a temporary spending bill that returned federal workers to their jobs, after a three-week partial government shutdown, will expire Jan. 26.

Rep. Newt Gingrich, the House speaker, continued sharply castigating the president Friday, saying Clinton had misled the American people by accusing Republicans of seeking excessive cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and other social-welfare spending, as opposed to slowing the growth in costs of the programs.

"I don't know how you have good-faith negotiations when somebody does that," Gingrich complained after the president's news conference Thursday.

But Friday the president went on the political offensive, calling Republican proposals to rein in Medicare spending and turn Medicaid into a block grant to the states a strike at the pockets of the middle class.

The Medicare debate, he said, is not just about the elderly but about "people like you" who "will have to spend more money on your parents and you'll have less money to send your kids to college."