ASHINGTON - President Clinton yesterday rejected charges that the scandals of his administration were dragging down Al Gore's campaign for president, saying that a lot of the ''so-called scandals were bogus'' and that the word itself has been ''thrown around here like a clanging teapot for seven years.''
Clinton said polls showing the vice president trailing Texas Governor George W. Bush, the presumptive Republican nominee, were an indication that voters are ''still trying to figure out what they think about this race.''
In the end, Clinton said, he doesn't believe people would hold Gore ''responsible for anything I did that they didn't agree with or that was wrong.''
During an hourlong news conference in the East Room of the White House, Clinton said he would be inclined to sign a bill to allow food and drug sales to Cuba once his concerns that the legislation does not restrict travel to the country are resolved.
He defended his administration's handling of the Elian Gonzalez case. However, he expressed regret about how events in the case unfolded, saying he wished the matter had been handled in a ''less dramatic, less traumatic way for all concerned.''
Clinton said the best solution to lowering gasoline prices would be a ''long-term strategy'' to promote conservation and alternative sources of energy.
He said pump prices in the hard-hit Midwest have fallen 8 cents a gallon since the Federal Trade Commission began its investigation into oil pricing.
On the death penalty, Clinton said he believes there should be the broadest possible use of DNA evidence and adequate access to counsel for defendants.
''Those of us who support the death penalty have an extra-heavy responsibility to assure both that the result is accurate and that the process was fair and constitutional,'' he said.
Clinton let out a hearty laugh when asked whether Bush possessed the intelligence to be president. ''That's a dead-bang loser, isn't it?'' he said. ''No matter what I say, I'm in a big hole.''
Without offering an opinion on Bush, Clinton said, ''The best is a president that has had broad experience and that knows a lot and that is curious.''
He showed no such hesitation in talking about Gore's qualifications and defending the vice president's lagging poll numbers.
''Nobody has ever done as much for America as vice president as Al Gore has,'' Clinton said.
Once voters know that, ''it's still more likely than not that he will win,'' Clinton said, despite the ''volatility'' of today's polls.
He defended Gore against calls for Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Gore's statements regarding fund-raising in the 1996 campaign.
''The only thing, as far as I know, that he's been in any way implicated in is this finance-campaign thing,'' Clinton said, adding that Gore had ''certainly demonstrated that a lot of the accusations against him with regard to that are not so.''
The president said there was no evidence in the polls to suggest voters were holding his administration's problems against Gore.
''Secondly, let me remind you that a lot of these other so-called scandals were bogus,'' Clinton said.
He cited the independent counsel probes of the Whitewater land deal involving him and the first lady, as well as those involving former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, accused of lying about a payment to his mistress, and former Agricultural Secretary Mike Espy, accused of accepting gifts from a company his agency regulated.
''Mike Espy was acquitted. The Cisneros thing was a tempest in a teapot, totally overdone. And you all know that the Whitewater thing was bogus from day one. It had nothing to do with the official conduct of the administration anyway,'' Clinton said.
''The word `scandal' has been thrown around here like a clanging teapot for seven years, and I keep waiting for somebody to say ... that a whole bunch of this stuff was just garbage.''
