ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 20, 1997 TAG: 9701200096
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
TODAY, President Clinton begins his second term. If he is like most second-term presidents, he is thinking about securing a respected place in history. If his second term is like most, that won't be easy.
To the generic obstacles of lame-duckery and agenda-exhaustion, Clinton has added a few of his own, among them: political bungling during his first term, the lack of any clear mandate from his re-election, and the array of scandals he's invited upon himself.
If his is to go down in the books as a historic presidency, Clinton must not only keep dodging ethics bullets, he must slow the fusillade. Otherwise, too much White House energy will be spent on alibis and excuses, evasions and explanations.
But let's assume Clinton has time to get around to policy, and clout to affect it. Here are things he could do to add stature big-time to his presidency:
* Make a start on reforming entitlements, Medicare most urgently and Social Security for the longer run. Rather than muddling and posturing, Clinton should accept big changes, such as means-testing, that would reduce the rate of entitlement spending growth while not perverting the fundamental goal of providing basic health-care and subsistence-income insurance.
* Continue to pay attention to one of the genuine successes of his first term, deficit reduction, but without jeopardizing America's future prosperity. Clinton should resist those for whom a perfectly balanced budget, year in and year out, has become a fetish to be enshrined in the Constitution. And he shouldn't allow deficit reduction to become an excuse for avoiding needed public investments - in early childhood education, anti-poverty efforts, research and development, and infrastructure. If he has any time left over, he should seek tax reform that simplifies the code but without putting a balanced budget beyond reach.
* Help Americans understand and embrace the transition from an industrial to an information economy. Clinton should keep attention focused, too, on an unfortunate by-product of this transition: the expanding gap - not just in income but in life prospects - between haves and have-nots. The president should keep moving his party away from its big-government ideology, while calling on more experiments in decentralization, public-private partnerships, and reciprocal obligations for those seeking government benefits. But he also needs to build public support for upgrading skill levels - such as making two years of college the educational norm. Without a better-prepared workforce, America can't stay competitive in the global economy or reduce the gap between rich and poor.
* Exercise the bully-pulpit to encourage national discussions of tough topics: racial division, political incivility, eroding sense of community, moral decay in popular culture, the plight of the poor, family breakdown. If we can't talk about these things, they'll only grow worse.
* Assume leadership in building international capacity, especially through the United Nations, for dealing with crises around the globe before they spin out of control. Also: Speak out against the manifestations of America's isolationist impulse.
For Clinton, as with all presidents, there are no guarantees. But how well he works on the above will go far in determining how well historians regard the last presidency of this millennium.
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