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: The Right Qualifications= Date: Thu, 29 Oct 92 04:29:59 EST Message-ID: <5.1992Oct29.042959@AmeriCast.com> The Right Qualifications= BILL CLINTON is ahead in the presidential race not just because the competition is implausible and weak, though it is both those things. In the months that he has crisscrossed the country in the campaign he has had to make the affirmative case as well that he is up to the job of president. We think he has shown he is up to it. No presidential candidate is ever perfect. But the people who continue to see this election as no more than a search for a least worst alternative by a process of elimination and default are wrong. Mr. Clinton has been elected governor of his state six times; has compiled an enviable and mostly progressive record there; understands the nuts and bolts of government, is aware of its limits yet enthusiastic (the most welcome change of all) about fulfilling its obligations; and has now conducted a tough and shrewd and admirable campaign in which he has shown himself capa- ble of motivating masses of people and marshaling support on a broader stage. George Bush says that Mr. Clinton has a character problem, the accusations being that the governor doesn't tell the truth and on too many issues tries to be on both sides. Our own sense is that those are precisely the traits that have, sadly, characterized and marred the president's career. Mr. Clinton seems to us to have displayed to the contrary a pretty remarkable constancy of purpose and view over his years in public life. He has mainly tried in ways that Mr. Bush has conspicuously not to make it a fairer, a genuinely kinder and gentler, society. There's a pretty good test of character and family values and all the rest. Mr. Clinton has his defects as we all do, but the "character issue" that the president has raised is mostly bogus and a caricature. The Democrats have produced, not the caricature figure the Repub- licans portray but a well-credentialed, balanced and strong can- didate who even in difficult times has a chance of being an ex- cellent president as the incumbent has not. The governor has rightly said that the policies of the past 12 years have left the country with two deficits, the familiar budg- et deficit but an enormous social deficit at the same time. They point in contradictory directions; his focus has been on the second, in a way that has distinguished him from both his major rivals. The educational system is failing; he has proposed ex- tending Head Start to all eligible children, a new revolving fund to help support higher education, a system whereby recent gradu- ates could repay their debt to the fund with community service and (well before the president paid him the compliment of propos- ing an alternative) a major effort to retrain a work force facing increased foreign competition, defense reconversion and other fundamental shifts in the domestic economy. The candidate would step up spending on infrastructure and basic research as well, he says. He proposes health care reform; here, too, the president proposed a weak and incomplete alternative only under Democratic pressure 3 1/2 years into his term. Gov. Clinton's plan is vague in many places as well, but he has indi- cated he would be more aggressive as government must in both con- trolling costs and broadening the tent to cover the uninsured. He has said that as part of welfare reform he would crack down on fathers who fail to pay child support (again producing a response from the administration in the form of an echo) and would seek to adjust the relevant mechanisms - minimum wage, earned income tax credit - so that no child of parents working full-time year-round would have to live below the poverty line. A Clinton administration would not be cynically divisive on race in the way that the Reagan-Bush administrations have; would defer to individual conscience on such issues as abortion, a healthy retreat on the part of government that one would think conserva- tives would be the first to applaud; would stop the packing of the courts in the direction of the past 12 years; and, if the candidate is to be believed, would in fact "clean House" in a way George Bush refused to do by supporting congressional campaign finance reform. The governor is inexperienced in foreign affairs, but nothing in the campaign suggests that he would falter in the field; his responses on the subject have been good. His positions on ques- tions of national defense and the defense budget - he would cut it more than Mr. Bush but less than many members of his own party - have seemed to us about right. So too with his position on trade, on which he has mostly resisted his party's protection- ists. He has said pretty straightforwardly that he would not attack the deficit his first few years in office, a mistake in our view. The deficit is expected to decline somewhat (but not enough) in the next several years on its own if the economy recovers and as the cost of the savings-and-loan bailout recedes. Mr. Clinton has ba- sically promised only to make it no worse, and it is not clear how the tax increases and spending cuts he has outlined would let him do even that and still finance his ambitious agenda. He has said that if he doesn't have the money he will scale back the agenda. But the difference is this. The government faces these two enor- mous contradictory problems simultaneously in a weak economy - reducing the budget deficit while attacking social problems - and Mr. Bush would make both worse. He would increase the pressure on government by cutting taxes further. Ross Perot's campaign was largely founded on the notion that he would attack the deficit, but his impressive plan to do so has all but faded from view. Bill Clinton says he will try to ride both horses at the same time, as the country must - increase public investment, as he calls it, as much as he can without increasing either the deficit or the burden on the middle class. Sure he'll have to compromise among these goals, but the man wants to govern, and after 12 years of people whose goal has been to immobilize the government, it's time to give him the chance.02:04 10-29C9999----- Copyright 1992, The Washington Post. 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