THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408120007
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
Well, it's easy. Americans lack confidence in him. That's why Bill Clinton receives such low performance ratings even as the economy grows and U.S. forces are kept out of combat. Relative peace and prosperity ought to boost poll ratings well above the lousy scores he's getting.
Polls, to be sure, are mere snapshots but if you never shine, they turn into engravings. Any doubt about the gulf between voters and the president dissolves in the distance campaigning congressmen are putting between themselves and Clinton as midterm elections approach. He has no coattails.
The party apparatus chaired by David Wilhelm must have roadside repairs and, pretty soon, a new driver. The vaunted Clinton health plan has been rejiggered and renamed in a desperate bid to enhance its prospects. Mrs. Clinton loses ground by strident overuse of the ``moral authority'' the president once ascribed to her. For all key elections held since the Clintons took over, Democrats have a goose egg.
Suppose health-care reform does pass: Will it make a significant difference in how voters regard the president? Not if polling on the economy is any indication. On that score Clinton exhibited courage and vision and delivered results in the face of 57 varieties of GOP partisanship. Despite calamity howlers like Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm, employment rose and inflation fell following passage of the president's economic program. And the deficit dropped sharply, ending 12 years of meek acquiescence in its increase by those stout apostles of ``conservatism,'' Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
But Clinton's reward has been a nose dive of voter confidence in Democratic ability to handle the economy and an upsurge of confidence in Republicans.
According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, Democrats had a 16-point margin when Clinton took office, but they now lag the Republicans by 11 points. This may have something to do with the fact that the recovery is no boom, that the quantity of new jobs exceeds their quality, and that a steady run of downsizing layoffs has sapped hope of really good times returning.
Support for universal health care is conflicted with fear that it might come at the cost of jobs or a boost in the deficit or both. It does not help to hear responsible Republican senators like John Danforth of Missouri say that existing benefit programs have put us ``on a course toward national bankruptcy.'' Or to hear Americans, when polled, respond as always by saying the cost of the programs must be cut but not the benefits.
It's just as difficult to see how Bill Clinton can make progress. The first few Whitewater hearings revealed a political protection league operating in the Treasury Department whose assumed head, Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, pleaded ignorance. There will be more hearings and more excavation of the president's past. These will distract and distress and erode.
True, the president displayed supreme poise in his press-conference emphasis that Treasury officials had broken no laws and breached no rules of ethics. But the afterglow was glibness of the sort that earlier had led Mrs. Clinton to say her own know-how had led her to a quick little fortune in the futures market. It is disheartening to see an administration that boasted of higher morality, trying to defend itself by raking up Watergate and Iran-Contra, infinitely worse but irrelevant.
If a Washington Post source has it right, Bill Clinton is in a ``major bitter funk'' that he's being mistreated by the mass media, and wants, therefore, to upgrade his press agentry. The problem, alas, is that he himself has never succeeded in connecting with the sympathies of Americans or inspired their trust. He, therefore, does not look the better for the ugliness of some of his enemies. And worthy achievements are not remembered or remarked. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB