December 30, 1994

In looking back on the year's best and worst advertising, picking the worst, alas, is easy. It takes only a moment to find 10 -- or 10 times 10 -- mishaps, misfires and backfires. But the best? Oy!

ON New Year's Eve in New York City, it's a seller's market for revelry. The streets are swarmed and the restaurants packed with prospective merrymakers, all seeking the right place and atmosphere to share the ballyhooed moment when the calendar changes. Live music, with its promise of instant community and Dionysian prospects, is a potent lure; from the jazz cafes to Madison Square Garden, music packs 'em in, as people choose to spend the evening with others who share their taste or dance to the same beat. For many people, putting on a party hat and slipping a CD into the home stereo -- or watching the Guy Lombardo Orchestra on PBS -- just doesn't provide the same excitement. Even at places that don't usually present music, New Year's Eve is the time to book a band.

Having failed to resolve the budget impasse that has preoccupied City Hall for more than a month, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani yesterday carried out his threat to unilaterally impose nearly $800 million in spending cuts. The move puts into place a budget that will reduce spending for virtually all municipal services, even while it leaves many aspects of the budget unclear. Mr. Giuliani's decision to cut the budget by such a large amount on his own -- the first step of such magnitude by a mayor -- comes a week after a state judge threw out both his initial budget proposal and an alternative version of cuts enacted by the Council. The Mayor's aides said his latest move would finally allow them to achieve their goal of balancing the city's $31.6 billion budget by cutting city spending by nearly 4 percent.

No one knows where Jose Villarreal, a thickset ninth grader with a baby's cheeks and a rebel's crew cut, might be if Gina Ybarra had not gone to his house so many cool mornings and pulled the covers from his face, had not lugged him out of bed and waited for him to get dressed so that she could drive him to school. It is not certain what would have happened if Ms. Ybarra, his case manager in a widely regarded pilot project for troubled youths, had not gone to class with him to make sure he behaved and did his work. Or if she had not argued his case whenever the principal wanted to suspend him for cursing the teachers and fighting. Or if the project had not got him a summer job or into therapy.

As Bill Clinton has struggled to right his Presidency in the grim weeks since Election Day, his advisers say, he has consulted friends old and new, far and wide, and heard them out at all hours of day and night. But he appears to have listened mostly to the man who has been his chief political strategist for 20 years: Bill Clinton. If there was any doubt about the President's resolve to keep his job, he removed it today, taking the opportunity of a year-end interview with news-service reporters to declare unequivocally that he would run for re-election and to allow gamely that he was "not worried" about the possibility of a Democratic primary challenge.