THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 8, 1996 TAG: 9609060012
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: 83 lines
As he campaigns for a second term, dislike and distrust deny Bill Clinton hard-won credit for risky but productive decisions. While Republicans predicted a ruined economy, Clinton raised taxes on the better off, reduced the deficit and spurred the economy with lower interest rates. Unemployment and inflation fell during a slow but steady recovery that continues.
If times aren't good, they are better. Even editorialists at The Wall Street Journal, through clenched teeth, offer a ration of praise. It's true that it was left to Congress to cut away Clinton's porky ``stimulus''' spending; he's never far from a new appropriation. But what's a Congress for, and wasn't trimming pork a good and novel exercise in discipline for those honorables?
As for world affairs, Clinton early on was adrift and hobbled by caution. But few pots boiled over, war-spreading threats now seem diminished, and bully boys generally have less sway. His youthful draft-evasion forever undermines Clinton as commander in chief, but he bears stoically the now pointless criticism, and works on the agenda he inherited.
Interestingly, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp rely less on faulting Clinton's overall record and more on his character flaws even as they distill their own election offer of cash-in-hand through tax cuts and a balanced budget in the bye-and-bye.
The problem of being for Bill Clinton is not knowing who he is and what he's for. Many voters feel that another new Clinton is only a poll away. He perhaps is best defined as not Newt Gingrich. But, then, neither (some days) is he the New Democrat who vanished after his election bid and reappeared later to sign the welfare-reform bill. Or the liberal Democrat who blundered on health-care reform, gay rights in the military and the handling of many slipshod appointments. Clinton continues in a state of constant re-invention, a process serving as both tactics and strategy.
Under hard hammering, he has proved patient, resilient and extraordinarily elastic; about his core beliefs there's a distinct transiency and faddishness - excepting an undoubted commitment to racial justice and amity, and to free trade. Regarding individual rights, a traditional litmus test for liberals, Clinton has been weak and dodgy, especially in response to revelations that the administration grossly mishandled raw files from the FBI.
If Clinton had one big strategic idea, he could have shortened drastically (and mercifully) the litany on inconsequence at the Democratic convention. Most of the policy direction in Clinton's first term has come from a Republican Congress which forced him to commit to a balanced budget, to reduced spending, to reform of welfare and other entitlement programs and to public concession that the era of big government is over.
What policies would guide a second Clinton term? The convention provided no answer. From the rostrum and the campaign gravy train came a string of doodad and whatnot notions with a price tag of $8.4 billion which suggested that the carcass of big government has a few kicks left notwithstanding these words from the Democratic platform: ``Big bureaucracies and Washington solutions are not the real answers to today's challenges. We need a smaller government.
If some of Clinton's campaign notions have merit, they still amount to an avoidance of policy questions, chief among them being how the nation is to fund its existing obligations under the entitlement programs that make up the bulk of government spending.
In order to escape being flattened by the Gingrich steamroller, Clinton already has charged that question with fear. He will increase the dosage as necessary during the campaign because his campaign is anchored to the status quo. This will make hard questions even harder to deal with or even to discuss after the election. Curfews, school uniforms and family values chitchat make easier, though hardly presidential, topics.
Clinton concedes in a Newsweek interview that as more retirees take out and fewer workers pay in, entitlements represent a ``very serious problem if nothing is done. . . .'' But he is ``just not worried about it'' because ``the people like me, the oldest of the baby boomers, will demand'' reform for the sake of ``our children.''
This attitude is marbled with complacency and convenience. It was no baby boomer but out-of-fashion Ross Perot who demanded action on deficits and who, in the doing, may have made possible a first term for Clinton.
All too obviously with his tax cuts, Bob Dole is betting that the country still hasn't kicked its addiction to deficits and debt, and hankers to spin yet again the wheel of fortune. Not sure himself, Bill Clinton long ago prepared a list of ``targeted'' tax cuts, much smaller than Dole's but alluring to the constituency groups that will benefit. Clinton and Dole are united on one policy: They aim to please even if that means having no policy at all. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB