MR. PRESIDENT: EXACTLY WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR?

Last week, President Clinton made history with his State of the Union address. It marked the first time in 46 years that this annual rite saw a Democratic president addressing a Congress with Republican majorities in both houses. On this occasion as on so many others, it was beyond contest that Clinton is a persuasive rhetorician of formidable skills. Understood purely as rhetoric, however, communication is a hollow concept, or what the social scientists call "value-neutral." The question then arises: In the service of what themes or goals will Clinton's finely honed communication skills be harnessed?

Well, last Tuesday night, they were harnessed for exactly one hour and 21 minutes of talking. Clinton knows not the virtues of brevity, and one is tempted to recall the admonition of Muriel Humphrey to her husband, Hubert, the late Minnesota senator, former vice president and a politician given to interminable public address: "Hubert, remember, in order for a speech to be immortal, it need not be eternal."

Again, though, the annual State of the Union event should be the occasion not for reciting a laundry list of minutiae, but for elucidating broad themes and goals. What are Clinton's?

Cut through the oratorical fog and you'll find, once again, a politician desperately hungering for approval from just about everybody. That is to say, the president wants to be all things to all people, all the time. In chasing this will-o'-the-wisp he is certain to fail. As the November elections demonstrated, he already has.

Clinton, the New Democrat, was impressive in the closing 20 minutes of the speech, which amounted to an almost Reaganesque performance. To get to that point, however, Americans waded through an hour of blather about this, that and the other.

Listen to Clinton's rhetoric and you hear a man saying he wants a leaner, more efficient government. The voters he is wooing, however, haven't forgotten that this is the same man who spent two years trying to sell a gigantic health care plan that was the biggest expansion of government in a generation. He pledges to reform the nightmare of unfunded federal mandates yet proposes new ones. And he seemingly has no real quarrel with those dinosaurs in his own party who, without any ideas of their own, are in the last ditch fighting every Republican effort to deal with these costly and onerous mandates.

And this is the president who has recently floated the idea that the answer to our economic problems is an increase in the minimum wage. For this we elected a Rhodes scholar with degrees from Georgetown and Yale? If the shrunken Clinton presidency can be reinflated on the discredited idea of increasing the minimum wage, then pigs can take wing.

It is hard to escape the sense that the American people are far, far ahead of this president, his advisers and his please-everybody vision of the state of the union. Last fall's elections said loud and clear that the American people are ready for sweeping reforms that radically curtail federal overreaching and "give us our freedom back," as one freshman congressman put it. Agree or disagree, the new congressional leadership is trying, at least, to deliver on what they understand to be a clear electoral mandate.

In the face of such clear fault lines in our politics, where and for what does Clinton stand? He stands for everything. And that, halfway through his term, is the president's problem, and everyone else's.