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: Voters Entrust White House To Baby Boomer;Economic, Social Woes Present Huge
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 92 04:54:43 EST
Message-ID: <37.1992Nov4.045444@AmeriCast.com>

Voters Entrust White House To Baby Boomer;Economic, Social Woes
Present Huge Task for President-Elect<By David S.
Broder=Washington Post Staff Writer=

An anxious and angry American electorate has entrusted the White
House to the first president of the baby boom generation, choos-
ing Bill Clinton to confront economic and social problems as
daunting as the global crises that preoccupied the presidents of
the Cold War.

Clinton has the advantage of leading the first government in 12
years with a Congress and executive of the same party.  He has
the task of rallying broad support after winning substantially
less than a majority of the popular vote. He knows he must work
quickly, because George Bush goes into the history books as the
fifth president of the last six who failed to make it through two
terms.

And he has to reckon with the fact that one-sixth of the American
electorate, by voting for free-spending, self-financed indepen-
dent Ross Perot, signaled its deep skepticism about the honesty
and efficacy of the political system that produced both Clinton
and Bush.

The realization of the task ahead sobered Democrats even in their
moment of celebration. Former vice president Walter F. Mondale,
the loser of the 1984 presidential race, hailed an election that
he said "signals the end of 12 years of Reagan-Bush economic pol-
icy that the American voters have judged a failure."

But in almost the next breath, he cautioned, "If Congress treats
Bill Clinton the way it did Jimmy Carter, we won't be out of
power for 12 years but for 28 years next time."

There was reason for such caution, for the 100 million or so
Americans who gave the Democrats only their second victory in the
past seven elections were sending many messages with their bal-
lots.

The clearest, as Mondale said, was an expression of dissatisfac-
tion with the country's economic performance - a slow crawl out
of a recession that Clinton repeatedly called the "worst economic
record since Herbert Hoover." But equally they seemed to be say-
ing that they wanted the president to focus on domestic needs,
not the international problems that preoccupied Bush and all his
predecessors since Pearl Harbor ended the nation's isolation.

In interviews outside the polls where many had waited for long
periods to cast their ballots, twice as many voters named the
economy and jobs as their main concern as mentioned any other to-
pic. Among those voters, Clinton had an absolute majority and
Bush only a quarter of the vote. Clinton's margin was even higher
for those focused on health care, education and the environment.
Only eight voters in 100 mentioned foreign policy as the main
concern, and they went overwhelmingly for Bush.

In that sense, history may have done more to undercut Bush's
chances of reelection than did Clinton and Perot. The World War
II naval aviator had focused his political career on national
security policy, prepping for the presidency in sensitive di-
plomatic posts and as director of the Central Intelligence Agen-
cy. The main achievement of his term - which for a time seemed
likely to seal his second-term victory - was his leadership of
the victorious international coalition in the 1991 Persian Gulf
War.

But the very triumph over communism that a sequence of presidents
from Harry S. Truman through Ronald Reagan had labored to achieve
- symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of
the Soviet Union during Bush's tour of duty - sent a message to
the American people that it was time to focus on the problems at
home.

That was something Bush seemed painfully slow and reluctant to
do. Activists in his administration urged him to seize the victo-
ry over Iraq in March of 1991 as the occasion to challenge the
Democratic Congress to deal with a conservative agenda of
economic-stimulus and "empowerment" programs for domestic social
needs. But Bush held back, as he did again in his State of the
Union message last January and his renomination acceptance speech
at the Republican National Convention in August.

Clinton was as eager to tackle those problems as Bush was reluc-
tant. As governor of Arkansas for 10 of the past 12 years, as a
leader of the National Governors Association and the Democratic
Leadership Council, he had cut his teeth on the issues of econom-
ic development, education, welfare reform and child care on which
the voters were focused.

Helped by the decision of many better-known Democrats to duck
challenging a war-hero incumbent, Clinton withstood a withering
set of challenges to his personal integrity and came out of the
Democratic convention with a lead he never relinquished - and a
running mate in Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee, who at 44
reinforced the ticket's youthful image.

If Bush were the last of the Cold War presidents - a succession
of men from Dwight D. Eisenhower on, who had been in uniform dur-
ing World War II - Clinton and Gore were the first of the baby
boomers to make it to the top of the political pole. Previous
figures from that vast populace born in the years after the war
had failed to win broad votes of confidence.  Gary Hart and Dan
Quayle became objects of ridicule, not respect. Clinton and Gore
overcame that skepticism - even though their own contemporaries
gave them the barest of pluralities over Bush, while the young
and the old offered majority assent to this generational change
of leadership.

What they do with this qualified gift of trust will determine
whether this election proves to be an important turning point -
or just another twist in the road.

Harry MacPherson, counsel in the Lyndon Johnson White House and
adviser to many Democrats since that time, offered a minimalist
interpretation of the election results.

"What I really think," he said, "is that Bill Clinton beat the
weakest Democratic field I've ever seen and then beat a president
who couldn't get it together, a president with a quarreling staff
and a laughed-at vice president. What people have decided is that
they don't want George Bush, or Tom Harkin (the senator from Iowa
who was one of Clinton's five opponents in the early primaries)
or Ross Perot or those other guys. They've decided to take a
chance on Bill Clinton.

"But tonight he starts another campaign, as important as the one
he's just finished, to prove he ought to be president. I think he
has the wit and the smarts to do it. But so far, he's just the
last guy on the raft."

Historian Michael Beschloss said that despite Clinton's fondness
for quoting John F. Kennedy and evoking the spirit of the 1960
election, when a 43-year-old Democrat replaced a 70-year-old
Republican incumbent, other parallels may be more pertinent for
the victory of the 46-year-old governor over the 68-year-old
president.

"It is like 1980," Beschloss said, "in the sense that Clinton,
like Ronald Reagan, faces the question whether he simply benefit-
ed from a vote against the incumbent or comes to office with a
mandate for new policies." Reagan claimed the mandate not only by
the size of his win but also by the gains his party made in
Congress.

With no evidence early in the evening of similar Democratic
congressional gains this year, Republicans were quick to say that
Clinton's victory was no signal that the conservative era was
over.

Retiring Rep. Vin Weber (R-Minn.), a co-chairman of the Bush cam-
paign, called it "a clear vote for change, but no ideological
swing to the left. The greatest danger to the Clinton presidency
would be to interpret it that way." Weber blamed Bush's defeat on
the fact that "when the country was demanding change, the GOP of-
fered nothing more than defense of the status quo."

While Clinton struggles with that challenge, Weber said, Republi-
cans have an opportunity to recoup fairly quickly by reaching out
to Perot's supporters.

Those who backed the Dallas billionaire were predominantly self-
described independents and were more worried by the budget defi-
cit - Perot's favorite example of the failure of two-party poli-
tics - than other voters.

In preelection interviews, many of the volunteer coordinators who
rallied to Perot expressed a determination to keep the organiza-
tion going, as a prod to Washington politicians of both parties
to put aside partisanship and deal with the country's needs.

Beschloss also compared Clinton's win to that of Franklin D.
Roosevelt in 1932. "He too was elected largely as a result of
economic crisis and came to office with a program that was well-
articulated but highly ambiguous. Even more than FDR, Clinton
will have to deal now with the ambiguities in his program and the
conflicts within the Democratic Party.  "Most Americans have for-
gotten that the New Deal was largely invented in the first 100
days of Roosevelt's administration, and it was the result of
FDR's brokering, not his conceptualizing. We'll see how skillful
Clinton is in doing that kind of work."

When he reached Little Rock at the end of his final campaign ral-
ly, Clinton said he understood that "the great challenge of this
time is whether we can take the phenomenal opportunity presented
to us by the end of the Cold War to create the most peaceful, ex-
citing. . . economically prosperous age the country has ever
known.

"For a dozen years now, we have clearly refused to grapple with
the changes we have to make in order to compete and win. . . and
we have permitted many of our deepest problems here at home to
fester."

The American voters agreed with Clinton's description of this mo-
ment in American history, with the challenge and opportunity it
presents.

Now, it is up to him - and the Democrats - to prove they are
equal to the task.<Staff researcher Mark Stencel contributed to
this report.<02:35 11-04C9999-----

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)