Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post
Newsgroups: americast.wpost
From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com
Organization: American Cybercasting
Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com
Subject: In Transition Twilight Zone, Clinton's Every Word Scrutinized;Clinton's Every
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 92 09:18:27 EST
Message-ID: <47.1992Nov22.091827@AmeriCast.com>

In Transition Twilight Zone, Clinton's Every Word
Scrutinized;Clinton's Every Word Scrutinized, Yielding Varied
Interpretations<By Ruth Marcus<Washington Post Staff Writer<

Getting elected may have been the easy part.

Now, President-elect Clinton finds himself in the twilight zone
of the transition, no longer a candidate but not yet a president.
The crystallized goal of winning the election has shattered into
the diffuse task of assembling a government. The lofty promises
of the campaign trail now must confront the cold reality of pol-
itical costs and budgetary constraints.

In the vacuum of the transition period, every word on issues from
the middle-class tax cut to the Haitian refugees is subjected to
microscopic scrutiny, often yielding conflicting interpretations.

If the genius of the Clinton campaign was its disciplined focus
on message - "The economy, stupid" - the Clinton transition stum-
bled slightly out of the gate.

Although it harnessed masterfully the new prestige of the
president-elect with Clinton's symbolic reaching out to common
people during his walk on Georgia Avenue last week, it has also
endured a torrent of stories about such "off message" matters as
homosexuals in the military and the role of Hillary Clinton.

"It's only been two weeks, but if a campaign is measured in dog
years, this is measured in whale years," said one Clinton aide.
"The level of anxiety and the kind of anticlimactic depression
that hits and the fact that you wake up the next day and say, 'We
really have to do these things,' is difficult for a lot of peo-
ple."

The task can be summarized: "How a Book Becomes Law." In "Putting
People First," Clinton set out an ambitious program to "change
America." He outlined his priorities in his first news conference
on Nov. 12 - job growth, deficit reduction, health care and
government reform.

But as Clinton himself recognizes, the grand ideas of the cam-
paign do not a legislative program make.  "It's all very well to
say you want an investment tax credit, and quite another thing to
make the 15 decisions that have to be made to shape the exact
bill you want," he explained at his news conference.

"It's all very well to say . . . that the working poor in this
country who are exploding exponentially, if they work 40 hours a
week and have a child at home, should be lifted out of poverty by
increasing the refundable income tax credit for the working poor,
and another thing to answer the five or six questions that define
how you get that done."

Once choices are made, he said, there is the problem of "basical-
ly making sure that we've got it all paid for, and then dealing
with the "It's only been two weeks, but if a campaign is measured
in dog years, this is measured in whale years."<

-Clinton aide on transition> practical details of how you take
ideas and work them into the incredibly complex laws governing
the congressional budgeting process and deal with the committees
and all that."

Giving precise content to campaign plans is only part of the work
confronting Clinton as he navigates the transition from candidate
to chief executive. Each of his programs collides with the status
quo and therefore carries political costs. For example, domestic
policy adviser Al From said, "There are a lot of people who have
interests in not seeing real campaign reform."

Likewise, he said, on Clinton's campaign pledge to reduce the
federal bureaucracy by 100,000 jobs and cut administrative costs
by 3 percent, "There's somebody at the other end of every one of
those federal dollars."

"You've got to have a strategy for spending political capital and
you've got to decide, are you going to spend it all in the first
three months?" said one adviser.

There are signs of a new political reality in other areas too.
Clinton the candidate repeatedly criticized President Bush for
"coddling" China. But Clinton the president-elect toned down his
rhetoric considerably Thursday in what some foreign policy ex-
perts thought was an attempt to avoid an early clash in his ad-
ministration. Likewise, after his pledge to reverse Bush's ban on
Haitian boat people raised speculation of a massive migration,
Clinton said it would be "very unwise" for anyone to interpret
his remarks to mean he would open the borders.

Asked how people are supposed to judge whether Clinton has backed
off various campaign promises, communications director George
Stephanopoulos offered a common-sense suggestion: "First, let's
see him get in office." Meanwhile, Clinton and his aides find
themselves in what one described as the "never-never land" of the
transition. He is finished with the campaign but without a pro-
gram for governing on the table and in the limbo of president-
in-waiting at the exact time that each utterance and gesture is
treated with new gravity.

"He's the president-elect," one aide said. "People read volumes
into every word." One example is the varying interpretations of
Clinton's statements on his promised middle-class tax cut: "I in-
tend to propose a tax package that is consistent with what I
recommended in the campaign. I have not made any decision to
change it." Some believe those words are a sign of backing off,
while others have treated them as a reaffirmation.  Some discern
wishy-washiness in Clinton's announcement that he will consult
with military leaders and others before lifting the prohibition
on homosexuals in the military; others take his comments as a
ringing restatement of his campaign pledge, leavened, perhaps,
with a touch of the Clinton instinct for conciliation and task
forces.

"You have a frenzy that is putting him through a microscope,"
said domestic policy adviser Bruce Reed. "The point is that re-
porters will expand whatever evidence they have into whatever
story they can find. There isn't enough evidence to support many
of the conclusions that have been drawn in the last week, but you
all have to write something."

With no leadership structure in place in the first few days after
the election, reporters concentrated on stories about campaign
infighting with an intensity that might have been dampened had
there been other news to fill the void.  Then came a spate of
stories, spurred by the confluence of a Veterans Day question and
a federal court ruling, about homosexuals in the military.

"If gays in the military is the first thing you're out here talk-
ing about at any length, yeah, it's a problem in the short run,"
said one campaign aide. "For a big constituency that's already
uncomfortable with you - the military - it's a direct slap at
them. And it says to the American people, 'Yeah, I'm the typical
liberal.' It wouldn't be the number one issue you want on the
screen to begin with."<02:52 11-22C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor-
poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)