ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 27, 1996 TAG: 9610290037
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
BILL CLINTON, though better at campaigning than governing, has grown in office and made himself preferable to the alternative.
Bob Dole, though better at governing than campaigning, has squandered what were his strengths as a lawmaker, and has given no compelling reason to choose him over the incumbent.
That's why voters should re-elect President Clinton.
To be sure, he's a slippery one, Clinton is. But his coping and groping toward consensus reflect uncertainties all Americans are facing in a changing world. And he hasn't stopped thinking about tomorrow.
Like Richard Nixon in 1972, Clinton may win handily despite the fact that few Americans particularly like or trust him. His passionate critics suggest the analogy could go further: that one or more of the controversies swirling around him could, after the election, bring Clinton down.
But the various mini-scandals, from Whitewater to Filegate, mostly involve the president's management abilities, his staff and his wife. Offering no comparison with, say, Watergate or Iran-Contra, the administration's ethical lapses appear to have been discounted by a public aware of Clinton's personal flaws but more concerned with other matters, such as the economy.
In this time of relative prosperity, he could be a terrible president and still enjoy a lead in the polls, given the advantages of incumbency. But, all the Clinton-haters notwithstanding, he hasn't been a terrible president.
He has made mistakes, yet along with the nation has kept learning. He learned, for instance, of Americans' impatience with know-it-all government. Clinton's overreaching on health-care reform, among other errors in his first two years, helped prompt the GOP congressional sweep in 1994, a lesson in itself.
Clinton also has learned that being president is, in part, responding to what comes up - including in places like Haiti, Bosnia and the Mideast. He struggled at first to find his foreign-affairs footing, not paying the world enough attention and getting burned for it. His exercise of foreign policy seems more confident now.
Clinton learned early on, as well, that governing isn't all fun; sometimes you have to take care of business first. He would have liked more public investment in training, education and infrastructure to aid the transition to a knowledge-based global economy. But upon entering office, he decided that reducing the deficit (inherited from previous administrations) had to be the first priority. That decision, like his leadership in securing free-trade agreements, buttressed the economy as well as his re-election prospects.
First Baby Boomer in an age of virtual reality, Clinton has appeared at times a flickering figure, reflecting the shape of the moment and defining himself more by what he is not than what he is. Not a right-winger intent on criminalizing abortion, ravaging the environment or gutting government to give tax cuts to the wealthy; neither is he an old-fashioned liberal who defends welfare, coddles criminals or grows the bureaucracy. He is something else.
Between those who blame government for every problem and those who demand that it fix every problem, Clinton usually has sought a middle path, on which a smaller, more flexible government might help people address problems for themselves. During the long campaign, he has strewn this path with a flurry of post-it notes listing things to do - to be helpful but not too expensive, expansive or intrusive.
Typically these mandate goodies but pass the costs to businesses and consumers (family leave, a higher minimum wage, portable health insurance). Or they announce new initiatives but in limited, pilot, volunteer or symbolic form (empowerment zones, Americorps, reading tutors, proliferating death penalties). Or they commend stricter discipline, but only for the kids (v-chips, student uniforms, the campaign against teen smoking).
Such tinkering makes for smart political positioning. It co-opts the social concerns and family-value issues formerly owned by Republicans who abandoned the center in their rush to the right. But it also suggests engagement, if by trial and error, with the tricky challenge of downsizing central government without abandoning public responsibilities.
Empathic gestures won't suffice, of course, when it comes to the harder choices and bigger challenges the next president will face - attempting to slow runaway entitlement spending, responding to any number of foreign crises, trying to manage the consequences of welfare reform and the accelerating pace of economic change. Clinton's demagoging about GOP Medicare "cuts" won't make any easier the challenge of addressing intergenerational inequities.
But, in spite of, as well as because of, an apparently promiscuous need to please everyone, President Clinton seems likely to do what he can, within constantly shifting margins, to leave the country better off. He may be an undisciplined opportunist, but he is smart and well-intentioned, and his malleability is acutely responsive.
Besides which, for electoral purposes, voters must judge the candidate not against absolute standards, but against his opponent. Dole, too, has shown he's malleable, but in ways far less fortunate for his candidacy.
You want another Reagan? I can be Reagan, Dole told a Republican audience in 1995. But he is no Reagan. Voters don't find in him the sunny optimism that Reagan exuded, or the ex-president's ability to communicate a simple message. Voters also rightly disbelieve the former senator's pledge to provide a half-trillion-dollar tax reduction, bigger defense and a balanced budget without cutting Medicare or Social Security.
Dole's strength at the start of the campaign was his character and constancy, demonstrated over the years as a Senate leader who avoided ideological disputes and knew how to make deals and solve problems. Battle-tested, Dole was the grown-up who knew himself.
Then he caved to the Christian Coalition on the Republicans' extreme anti-abortion-rights platform. He embraced the supply-side economics that he once ridiculed. He abandoned long-held views on affirmative action, immigration and term limits. He attacked President Clinton's judicial appointees, until it was pointed out that he had voted to confirm 182 of 185 of them. He reversed himself on, and so killed in the Senate, an important chemical-weapons treaty supported by Reagan and Bush.
His campaign has been a vacillating, equivocating, desperate muddle. Corrupted at its core by the betrayal of his decades-old commitment to fiscal responsibility, Dole's disastrous candidacy does not cancel out Clinton's flaws. But it does raise doubts about the Republican's capacity to be president, and leaves him without a case for replacing the incumbent.
LENGTH: Long : 110 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENT ENDORSEMENTby CNB