It's the Economy, Right? Guess Again
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

THROUGH months of campaigning, Senator John Kerry has presented himself as a centrist on economic policy, a New Democrat directly out of the Clinton mold. He has pledged to cut the deficit, move the country toward budget surpluses and recreate the booming economy of the Clinton years. As if to underscore the point, he has recruited most of his economic advisers from the former president's administration.

But centrism is an easier position to maintain when the economy is in trouble, as it seemed to be in the early days of the campaign. Back then, Mr. Kerry could convincingly denounce President Bush as a miserable manager of the American economy. That argument is harder to make now that a stronger economy has been generating jobs, although at a slower rate in June. So Mr. Kerry is talking more boldly about policy.

Of course, the centrism still comes through loud and clear in speeches and in interviews. But in the heat of the policy debate, deficit reduction appears to be taking a back seat to what is easily Mr. Kerry's most significant economic proposal: an expensive expansion of government-financed health insurance.

He says he would subsidize health insurance for millions of people not covered now. That is the jewel of his economic plan. An omnibus health insurance bill would be the first legislation sent to Congress in a Kerry presidency, he says. But while the centrist Kerry still advocates shrinking the budget deficit, a bolder Kerry, less noticeable so far in the campaign rhetoric, adds that if the deficit threatens to rise rather than fall, well, so be it - he'll go ahead with his health plan anyway.

"Health care is sacrosanct," Mr. Kerry said in a telephone interview, offering the most explicit commitment to date to a program that he estimates would cost $650 billion. That is an amount greater than the cost of all his other economic proposals combined.