GOP Expects a Bonanza as Polls Show Harm From Whitewater : Politics: Some Republican strategists say impact could extend to fall elections. Will Democratic candidates distance themselves from Clinton?

WASHINGTON —  Republican strategists, already savoring the discomfort inflicted on President Clinton by the burgeoning Whitewater controversy, now hope to reap a much larger political bonanza.

With polls showing Whitewater hurting both the President and the First Lady, some GOP officials said that the impact could extend to Democrats running in next November’s congressional races and inflict long-term damage on the national party as a whole.

Rep. Bill Paxon (R-N.Y.), chairman of the GOP Congressional Campaign Committee, said Thursday that Clinton is becoming “a serious liability” to Democratic candidates. A year ago they would have sought his support, he said, but “a majority of them now probably will distance themselves from him.”

If Republicans register gains in Congress and Clinton is further weakened, the result could be a major setback in the Democrats’ efforts to regain their old dominance of national politics. And the GOP has developed a two-part strategy to pursue that goal.

Republicans in Congress are keeping up attacks that have already led to the appointment of a special Whitewater counsel, the firing of White House lawyer Bernard Nussbaum and heavy pressure for full-blown congressional hearings.

At the same time, GOP Chairman Haley Barbour, in Denver attending a national meeting of state Republican chairmen, said that the party’s strategy outside Washington is to leave Whitewater to the press. Almost daily reports of document shredding, improper White House meetings and other alleged misconduct have kept the White House on the defensive and the issue at a fast boil.

“The Democrats have this fraudulent defense that it’s all being stirred up by the Republicans,” Barbour said. “When the Washington Post, L.A. Times and New York Times dig all this stuff up, they can’t say it’s Republicans doing it.”

Republicans have been attacking Clinton on the Whitewater issue for several months and Barbour, in an interview with Denver Post editors Wednesday, declared that, while he doesn’t know what the Clintons did, “they are doing the best job of looking guilty I’ve ever seen.”

On the other hand, Democrats in Congress have launched similar steady attacks on Republican presidents in the past. Democrats dogged President George Bush in the controversy over diversion of U.S. aid that helped arm Iraq in the years before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They also attacked President Ronald Reagan over the Iran-Contra scandal, which involved sale of U.S. arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages, with proceeds from those sales going to finance Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

In both cases the Democratic majority in Congress conducted sweeping hearings into the controversies--a step that it is now resisting on Whitewater.

Some GOP officials attending the Denver meeting, apparently unaware of Barbour’s strategy of leaving Whitewater to the press, were outspoken in saying that it would hurt the Democrats.

California Republican Chairman Tirso del Junco called Whitewater “more serious than Watergate” and Jeanie Austin, who jointly chairs the Republican National Committee, called it “definitely a negative for Democrats.”

Barbour said that he has refused to go on television to discuss the issue and “abet my adversaries’ defense.” Democrats, he said, tried to get him to appear on television with Democratic Chairman David Wilhelm “but I’ve turned them down. It would make it look political.”

Wilhelm said that he had agreed to go on a television show with Barbour, but he vehemently denied that Democrats had tried to get the Republican chairman to participate.

“I’m happy to go on television with him,” Wilhelm said. “That’s a pretty transparent argument he’s making. The Republican Party is basing its entire strategy on Whitewater. It’s their great political hope. They have nothing to say on health care or welfare reform or anything else.”

Some Republicans, including former Vice President Dan Quayle, have raised the specter of Watergate. And Rep. James H. Quillen (R-Tenn.), who has called on Clinton to resign, said that all telephone calls to his office have favored his position.

But Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), who has led the attack in the House, insisted that, while he expects hearings into Whitewater eventually to produce “a blockbuster,” he believes that any remedies for wrongdoing will be civil rather than criminal.

Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), who has pressed the attack in the Senate and pushed for congressional hearings, insists that “this is not an attempt to injure the presidency.”

But his attacks have gotten under the President’s skin.

“The Republicans have decided that Sen. D’Amato will be the ethical spokesman for the Republican Party in the Congress,” Clinton declared at one of two press conferences this week at which he discussed Whitewater. The comment was a sarcastic reference to an old Senate Ethics Committee inquiry that ended in 1991 with a rebuke of D’Amato for not preventing his brother from using his office on behalf of a defense contractor.

Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) has dismissed the idea of congressional hearings as “a political circus” and said: “All they want to do is to throw up a lot of dust and embarrass the President.” And several Democratic senators, including John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and Tom Daschle of South Dakota, rose to Clinton’s defense on the Senate floor Thursday.

But Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), declaring that Congress has a clear right to conduct hearings, said: “Let’s stop all the finger-pointing and let’s get on with the hearings.”

Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, said whether Whitewater remains an issue in the future will “depend mostly on what the President does now, and to a secondary extent what he did in the past.”

Times staff writers Karen Tumulty and William J. Eaton in Washington and special correspondent Kristina Lindgren in Denver contributed to this story.