ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 6, 1997 TAG: 9702060036
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
DELIVERED to a Congress controlled by the opposition and a national audience swelled by TV watchers waiting to learn the O.J. Simpson verdict, the president's address Tuesday night in some ways well reflected the state of a union struggling, amid disconcerting distractions, to find its bearings in a post-Expanding Government, post-Cold War era.
The speech was vintage Clinton. Smartly delivered, punctuated by pleas for unity, it included some truly important points. Equally predictably, much of it seemed a protracted, pedantic patchwork of poll-tested ideas dripping with empathy but clipped of ambition. Anticipation of the civil trial's outcome (Simpson's, that is) offered the night's only serious suspense.
Even so, the president's address did notably illustrate, as it perpetuated, a narrowing of political debate and ideals within a kind of muddled middle. It's a place where the range of ideological disagreement has diminished, where national challenges - and the resources to address them - are writ small, where wound-licking politicians on both sides attempt to dampen the public's disgust with partisan warfare. In creative maneuvering at the margins, the muddle may yet yield a method.
Clinton was chastened for trying to increase government, his opposition for trying to contract it. Now the converging parties appear ready for - what? Playing it safe?
Not quite. The president hasn't veered back to the left since the election, as some Republicans predicted he would. But neither, Tuesday's speech made clear, is he standing still. He appears to be continuing the political strategy that brought him re-election and rising approval ratings. Hence:
* His litany of bite-sized projects, from mandating child-proof safety locks on handguns to requiring coverage for 48-hour hospital stays after mastectomies. The point being to display an activist, if limited, role for government in touch with the concerns of families - especially women.
* His incrementalism that, while annoyingly limited, crawls in the right direction. Clinton didn't insist on health coverage for all children, but he did urge Medicaid's expansion to cover 5 million now-uninsured youth. He didn't call for preschool for all eligibly at-risk kids, but he did cite efforts to expand Head Start somewhat.
* His efforts to blunt ideological differences, co-opt conservative causes and pre-empt anticipated attacks. Clinton embraced a balanced budget even while criticizing (with cause) the proposed balanced-budget constitutional amendment. His moral authority in opposing the GOP's cynical proposal was diminished a bit by his stated eagerness, as a tough-on-crime president, to clutter the Constitution with a victims-rights amendment. Likewise, his desire to deflect fallout from his own re-election campaign's abuses detracts from any moral authority in calling for campaign-finance reform. Oh well.
* His emphasis on applying government less as problem-solver than as lever, model, exhorter, catalyst or facilitator. In a cheaper but more effective role, the feds expect obligations in return for benefits, and get states and localities, businesses and families to do heavy lifting that bureaucrats never will accomplish. Among citizens asked to do their part: business executives hiring welfare recipients, parents and volunteers reading to children, all Americans trying to overcome the differences that divide us.
Perhaps the most newly suggestive parts of the State of the Union address were its references to foreign policy and education. Clinton offered an extended case for U.S. engagement and leadership abroad, an argument he too seldom made in his first term. As for education, he tellingly asked for a bipartisan approach of the sort Washington was able (usually) to muster on foreign policy during the Cold War. Education, he said, is "one of the critical national security issues for our future . . . . Politics must stop at the schoolhouse door."
Some specifics of the education proposals in Tuesday's speech are questionable and should invite debate. But the president surely is right in recognizing educational achievement, especially in a global context, as the key to the future state of the union.
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