From: mok@fortsc.enet.dec.com (Charles Mok)
Subject: WSJ: On the hustings, Clinton proves slicker than ever
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Date: 28 AUG 92 15:28:23 PST


On the Hustings, Clinton Proves Slicker Than Ever

Potomac Watch. By Paul A Gigot.

The Wall Street Journal. August 28, 1992.

In 1903, a friend informs me, a Member of Parliament rose to mock a British
prime minister:

	"I'm not for free trade and I'm not 
	    for protection.
	I approve of them both, and to both have
	    objection....
	So in spite of all comments, reproach
	    and predictions,
	I firmly adhere to unsettled 
	    convictions."

Even if the lines are apocryphal, they capture the main, and maybe the only,
reason Bill Clinton might yet lose his run for the presidency.

President Bush says this election is about "trust," but the public already
knows how much it trusts him.  (Not a lot.)  What he really means is Mr.
Clinton can be trusted even less.  Apparently even the Bush campaign
understands that Mr. Clinton's largest remaining hurdle is this: A vote for him
requires a giant leap of faith.  This is true because of both Mr. Clinton's
public character and his party's recent history.

Regarding his character, Mr. Clinton is, if anything, getting even more
slippery.  Before the American Legion this week, he promised "one final
statement to set the record straight."

He then omitted that he'd acknowledged receiving a draft-induction notice in
1969 only after others disclosed it this year; that he'd joined an ROTC program
to protect himself for two months from the draft; and that he'd dropped ROTC
only after it was clear that draft calls were being curtailed.  The character
flaw isn't that Mr. Clinton didn't want to fight in Vietnam - few did - but
that he still feels compelled to shade the truth.

Mr. Clinton has impressed reporters as a "policy wonk" who knows issues.  But
his wonkism also lets him snow audience with a blizzard of phony nuance.  In
April, trying to out-green Jerry Brown, he endorsed raising corporate average
fuel-economy standards (CAFE) for autos to 40 miles per gallon (from 27.5). 
But last Friday, speaking in car-making Detroit, he dodged: "I don't think it's 
fair to impose a burden on an American fleet that has bigger cars than foreign
competitors do."

That followed a verbal flurry and this snow-job: "I strongly believe we have to
raise the mileage standards.  But I have never said I didn't think there was
more than one way to do it."  There is of course no other way to do it.

Mr. Clinton benefits from an odd cynicism among journalists that equates such
flip-flopping with political virtuosity.  It isn't the lying that matters, it's
the fetting away with it.  Journalists also enforce a curious double standard. 
Mr. Bush, it is said, is a hypocrite on abortion because he switched to an
anti-abortion position 12 years ago.

Yet Mr. Bush has since been as principled as the Pope compared with the
Arkansan.  Last year Mr. Clinton said he favored parental notice for teen-age
abortions.  As fro "spending tax dollars for any kind of abortion," he said, "I
don't think that's appropriate."  Now he vows he would "not veto any bill
requiring Medicaid funding" for abortion and favors only "caregiver" (teacher?
who?) notice by teens.

All positicians finagle, but doublt-jointedness matters with Mr. Clinton more
than most because he is supposed to be a new sort of Democrat.  Many good
people sincerely believe this, and Mr. Clinton keeps saying it.

Yet for anyone else to believe this requires a large suspension of disbelief. 
We have to forget that Ricki Seidman, the ex-Kennedy staffer who led the jihad
against Clarence Thomas, has joined the campaign.  Or ignore that it was the
Mondale wing, and not the Paul Tsongas wing, of the Democratic Party that won
him the nomination.  Or hope that the Democratic Congress Mr. Clinton now
tries to avoid won't devour him the way it did Jimmy Carter.  Or assume he
really is a free-trader in his heart, but needs to appease the AFL-CIO by
dumping on Mexican trade to win Michigan and Illinois.

Mr. Clinton's slipperiness is one reason his wife has become an issue.  Hillary
Clinton, to her credit, has strong liberal convictions and had declared them. 
She is one beacon in the foggy outline of what a Clinton administration would
really be like.

One Bush operative, who tends toward fatalism, nonetheless gives Mr. Bush an
outside chance to win because "the mortal accusation you can make against Bill
Clinton is this: He's a Democrat."  The Carter years were scary enough, and the
prosperity of the 1980s recent enough, he says, that the voters may figure
"things may be bad now but they could get worse."

Karl Rove, a Texas Republican, says both candidates will make mistakes in
debate this fall.  But Mr. Bush's will be of the daffy supermarket-scanner type
- reinforcing what the public already knows.  Mr. Clinton will err in a way
that raises doubts about his characte: a "didn't inhale" reprise.

This may be a GOP pipe dream, in a year when a weak economy and the Cold War's
end have voters eager for change.  But it's also true that in Britain this
spring the Tories trailed in every poll up to the election they proceeded to
win.  Voters didn't like the Tories, or their Bush-like leader John Major, but
in the end they trusted the "remade" Labor Party even less.  Republicans hope
voters see Willie as Neil Kinnock with a drawl.