CLINTON SEEKS ECONOMY INPUT VIA SATELLITE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 7, 1993                   TAG: 9302070115
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
CLINTON SEEKS ECONOMY INPUT VIA SATELLITE
Bill Clinton will make history at 8 p.m. Wednesday when he becomes the first president to use satellite wizardry in a high-tech town meeting with ordinary Americans.
The same television station - and conceivably the same studio, microphone and high stool - that played host to candidate Clinton in Detroit last September will be doing it again; only this time with audiences in Miami, Atlanta and Seattle linked by satellite.
This time it will be President Clinton: a president with a national appeal not for votes but for spending cuts, tax hikes and individual sacrifice; a president struggling to forge an economic plan before his fast-approaching State of the Union speech Feb. 17.
"The State of the Union will be a very key time," said White House media director Jeff Eller, who began arranging the town meeting last Monday. "The president wants to listen to people, to get input about jobs and the economy."
Clinton also wants to prepare Americans for the sacrifices he will be asking them to make when he unveils his budget.
But skeptics question the value of the exercise.
"How much listening does he still have to do? I mean he's spent a year listening," commented Brookings Institution analyst Stephen Hess, an adviser to Democratic and Republican adminstrations past. "This looks more like damage control, or something in the notion of the `permanent campaign.' "
Clinton is not the first president to hold town meetings. Jimmy Carter held several, including one on his first trip as president. But they were local events unvarnished by any communications wizardry.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt was famous for his "fireside chats" on radio, and Ronald Reagan often turned to television to address the public directly on issues of importance, but these were one-way communications without the give-and-take of the talk-show format.
The only national channel planning to carry Clinton's hour-long town meeting live was C-Span, the politics-and-policy cable network that reaches 58.5 million households. But some network affiliates may also choose to air the program live.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB