Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 15, 1992 TAG: 9203150066
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WALTER MEARS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Gov. Bill Clinton acknowledged the problem.
"We all have just burst upon the scene," he said after taking command of the dwindled Democratic field heading into the Illinois and Michigan primaries that could prove his clinchers.
Clinton was anointed the likely leader before the first vote was cast. Then came the personal controversies, first over a woman's claim of an illicit affair, published in a supermarket scandal tabloid; then over the draft status that kept him out of the Vietnam War. Now Clinton's campaign has arranged a lawyer's review of a controversy involving his personal finances, seeking to quash that one.
Clinton claims to have dispelled those problems with his eight-state victory on Super Tuesday, saying Southern voters heard the worst about him but voted for him on the issues.
But that hasn't calmed concerns among elected Democrats, who worry that there may be more.
Struggling to catch up and keep going, the second-place Democratic campaigner, Paul Tsongas, is trying to use the character issue while professing innocence.
"Whatever vulnerabilities I have are on the issues," he says. `They're not vulnerabilities of character and judgment."
"I'm not carrying baggage," he said in a PBS television interview. "Bill Clinton is just one story after another. You don't think the Republicans are doing all the research into all those things?"
Tsongas claimed he hasn't gone after Clinton on character but said Republicans wouldn't be so genteel.
That's the sort of savage gentility Democrats had hoped their hurry-up nominating system would avoid this time. Ronald Brown, the party chairman, had said the Democrats would avoid the litmus test battles over political philosophy that have hampered their tickets before. But an in-party argument over the character of the man most likely to be nominated may prove more damaging.
"I've always been in favor of an early nominee, and it seems to me that we still have a chance of achieving that goal," Brown said after Super Tuesday.
But the contest may be settled before the questions are. The Democrats overhauled their nominating process for the 1972 campaign in a reform movement that stripped power from state party leaders and kingmakers and gave it to voters. That made the primaries, not the political clubrooms, the forum in which earlier candidates auditioned and won support for the nomination.
That's been the system since, which produced the front-loaded schedule with more than half the pledged delegates to be chosen by the end of this month and more than 70 percent before May.
According to a network-sponsored poll of Super Tuesday voters in five states, 40 percent of the Democrats who cast ballots weren't satisfied with their options.
Clinton says that is because "none of the candidates are all that well known yet" and said it won't persist.
As a springtime symptom, that's manageable. The Democrats' risk is in the possibility of a recurrence later, when their ticket is set.
by CNB