ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, October 26, 1996 TAG: 9610280050
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
Four years ago, they went head to head as press secretaries for rival presidential candidates Bill Clinton and George Bush.
Nowadays, Dee Dee Myers and Marlin Fitzwater stand side by side as lecture circuit pals, and on Friday at Roanoke College, found themselves in agreement on why Bob Dole's campaign doesn't seem to be doing so well:
Women don't like Republicans this year.
``If he does lose, the gender gap is clearly the single biggest factor against him,'' Fitzwater said, citing polls showing that Clinton is running ahead of Dole by landslide margins among female voters. ``It's not just liberal women, but conservative women.''
The former Bush spokesman fixed part of the blame for Dole's weak support on the Republican Congress, whose leaders, he said, have pursued a social and fiscal agenda that has scared away too women.
To that, Myers - well, Myers could only nod.
And these guys were on opposite sides once?
This political odd couple is not exactly the 1990s equivalent of Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy and LSD guru Timothy Leary, who toured college campuses together and offered high-voltage debate.
Instead, Myers and Fitzwater - paired together first by fate and now by the same booking agency - offer a much more collegial discussion of things political.
In town to speak to a private gathering of top Roanoke College contributors, the two took time out to offer their assessments of the current presidential campaign.
At times, they almost had to strain to disagree - about either the expected outcome of the Nov.5 balloting, or the reasons why Clinton leads Dole by a wide margin in most polls.
Occasionally, the Republican Fitzwater even had to stop himself from speaking about Clinton's victory as a sure thing and add an obligatory ``if.'' He also offered the strongest praise of Clinton, at least in analytical terms: ``Clinton is the best TV performer we've ever had in the presidency.''
Together, Myers and Fitzwater traced Clinton's comeback to the same event. ``The Republican takeover of Congress was the best thing to happen to Clinton,'' said Myers, who was Clinton's first press secretary and now is co-host of CNN's ``Equal Time'' program. ``It gave him an enemy.''
It also, she suggested, gave him cover to embrace some conservative positions that a Democratic Congress wouldn't have allowed, such as endorsing a balanced budget. ``Had he not come out for a balanced budget, he would have been hammered by the Republicans. But once he came out for it [in June 1995], it was `Let's talk about the details,''' which shifted the focus to Medicare and other issues that have played in the Democrats' favor. ``From June '95 on, the president had control of the political debate.''
Fitzwater - now writing books and trying to start an all-politics cable channel - said that Clinton's strong showing against Dole might have been inevitable. ``When the economy is in very good shape, it's very hard to convince people they need a dramatic new economy program," he said.
But Fitzwater also said that the GOP-led Congress never took time to address the concerns that many female voters have about its agenda:
``I think there are conservative Republican women who are pro-life but who are not willing to turn their bodies over to the government for regulation.
``I think there are conservative Republican women in the workplace who have known discrimination and are not quite anxious to do away with the protections in the workplace. I think there are conservative Republican women who have known hard times - they've been divorced, or they don't know how they're going to raise their kids - and they're not sure they want to cut away all the federal safety net. I think conservative Republican women who have these three fears are voting for Clinton.''
What next? The two once again found common ground, predicting a lively post-election battle that will pit each party's centrists against its ideologues. The more raucous, they agreed, would be on the Republican side. ``Half the party will recognize the gender gap as the reason it lost, and the other half will say he didn't win because he didn't run on social conservative issues,'' Myers said.
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: NHAT MEYER/Staff Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary toby CNBthen-President Bush, and Dee Dee Myers, former press secretary to
President Clinton, find it easy to joke Friday during a stop at
Roanoke College in Salem. KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENT