MOST POLITICIANS WOULD be nervous if they were planning to send troops into a war zone just before Christmas and also about to begin a campaign against tax cuts.

Believe it or not, White House aides say President Clinton is invigorated. Ready for battle. Undaunted. Choose your cliche.But Clinton's barely-back-from-the-brink political history indicates that they're right. He loves this kind of in-your-face debate over issues.

The public may be furious with government shutting down once and maybe twice, the nation practically in default and soldiers on alert. But Clinton seems to thrive on the challenge of convincing people that they don't think what they thought they did.

Nonetheless, despite Clinton's obvious skills in the arts of political persuasion, he is facing enormous risks.

He will soon announce his formal bid for re-election (his campaign office has been up and running for months but he hasn't officially announced). But like control freaks who have an answer for everything, he can be wearying. Even his supporters are sort of exhausted from having to defend him all the time.

Right now Clinton is trying to figure out his best strategies on both the budget and Bosnia.

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He needs to avert another government shutdown, which certainly was a pointless, costly exercise and did great damage to the credibility of Washington. He needs to avert financial default. He needs to be able to say the budget will be balanced in seven years. And, most of all, he needs to be able to say he didn't capitulate on his top priorities of holding the line on Medicare and Medicaid, the environment and education.

That leaves tax cuts. He will argue that the nation can't afford the Republican plan to cut $245 billion in taxes over seven years and must choose between a balanced budget and unnecessary cuts. One argument he'll use is that the GOP cuts are back-loaded; in 10 years the tax cuts will cost a total of $416 billion.

He will argue that the Republican plan to curb the earned income tax credit for the working poor is inherently unfair because at a time when most people would be getting a tax cut, about 7.7 million families earning less than $30,000 a year would be getting a tax hike averaging $338 a year.

Clinton will argue that America's credibility and leadership are at stake for the rest of the century. He'll say that morally America must try to keep violence from erupting again in Bosnia. He'll insist that NATO's future is at stake. He'll finesse the issue of Russia being invited into Eastern Europe again. He'll say there is an exit strategy and a timetable for withdrawal, although he'll be challenged on that.

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