TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/123091/1230101.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.0 KB | 226 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 19

Bill Clinton: Front Runner By Default


By MARGARET CARLSON/LITTLE ROCK


    Bill Clinton has the unlined, open face of a man who has
had it too easy. True, his father died before he was born, and
he grew up poor in the southwest Arkansas town of Hope (pop.
10,000). But Clinton was Hope's Doogie Howser, succeeding at
everything he tried, the darling of his teachers and one of the
first from the area to go to college. He got his bachelor's
degree at Georgetown University, won a Rhodes scholarship to
Oxford, then went on to Yale Law School, where he met his wife
Hillary. By 1979, 32 years old and back in Arkansas, he was the
youngest Governor in the country.

    Two years later, Clinton was the youngest ex-Governor in
the country. In Pea Ridge and the Ozarks, the voters resented
the notion that this whiz kid had returned home to put shoes on
everybody and introduce them to book learning. Says Carrick
Patterson, former editor of the Arkansas Gazette: "They thought
he had gotten too big for his britches." Clinton admits that he
took too much for granted. He hiked license-tag fees. The fact
that his wife used her maiden name and that the family was not
a member of any organized religion did not help either.

    By 1982 Hillary Rodham was answering to Hillary Clinton
and the family was worshiping regularly at Little Rock's
Immanuel Baptist Church. But mostly Clinton was two years older
and chastened. He was re-elected, with 55% of the vote.

    Are things once again going too smoothly for Clinton? At
45, he has a decade in the statehouse behind him. After Mario
Cuomo took himself out of the race for the White House, Clinton
became his party's media-anointed front runner. He may soon
discover that the worst thing that can happen to a candidate is
to be too far ahead too soon. The political press corps, which
prides itself on how quickly it can knock the stuffing out of
those who would run for President, has gone into a deep swoon
over his candidacy, from which it will sooner or later recover.
For the moment, reporters seem entranced by Clinton's persona:
a good-government geek saved by a self-deprecating sense of
humor. As chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group
that wants to yank the party back to the center, Clinton's idea
of a well-spent weekend is one given to working on welfare and
education reform. Yet when he was introduced at a forum in New
Hampshire as the smartest of the candidates, he quipped, "Isn't
that a little like calling Moe the most intelligent of the
Three Stooges?"

    Last summer, when rumors swirled about Clinton's alleged
extramarital affairs, some reporters thought they might have
another Gary Hart in their sights. But Clinton smoothly
deflected the inevitable "have you ever" question at a
Washington breakfast meeting with journalists. With Hillary
sitting next to him pushing scrambled eggs around her plate, he
said their 16-year marriage, like others, had had its ups and
downs, but "we believe in our obligation to each other." So far,
an army of reporters has failed to uncover a smoking bimbo.

    In the first televised debate among the candidates,
Clinton acted as though he were the returning champion on
Jeopardy while the others, especially Jerry Brown, behaved as
if they were on Let's Make a Deal. Clinton, seated on the end,
maintained an air of detachment, speaking only when called upon
by quizmaster Tom Brokaw. He managed to squeeze in concern for
the middle class about as often as Bob Kerrey referred to his
war record.

    Unlike many Southern pols, Clinton does not have a Velcro
personality, attaching country ways at home, then peeling them
away in the fund-raising parlors of Norman Lear and Pamela
Harriman. He makes $35,000 a year (supplemented by his wife's
salary as a lawyer). He helps his daughter Chelsea, 11, with
algebra by fax from the road. He is passionate about crossword
puzzles, and golfs and vacations every year with a group of
close friends in South Carolina. He has been wearing
off-the-rack clothes since the word got out that one of his
suits cost $800.

    When Clinton is not playing it safe, his personality is a
pole away from Michael Dukakis': he looks happy at the risk of
seeming insufficiently serious. His version of a campaign
handshake ranges from a bear hug to a full body slam. As he
plays host at yet another fund raiser and poses for one more
picture at a campaign breakfast with a woman dressed as if it's
cocktail hour, he can be as ingratiating as a frat-house
president during rush week. He told a voter during his last
Governor's race, "I was afraid you might be tired of me by now."
The farmer replied, "I'm not, but everybody else I know is."

    The whole country got a chance to get tired of Clinton in
1988, when he glazed the eyes of the delegates at the Democratic
convention by droning on for 33 minutes. The audience broke into
cheers when he finally got to "In conclusion . . . " After
Johnny Carson joked about what came to be known as "The Speech,"
Clinton wangled an invitation to appear on the show and play his
saxophone (badly).

    Now his campaign performances are polished and full of
specifics. When Clinton delivered a speech at Georgetown in
October, there were whoops as he lambasted the greedheads on
Wall Street and the drug dealers of Mean Street, and again when
he laced into George Bush for dividing the country by using the
oldest tactic in the book: "You find the most economically
insecure white people, and you scare the living daylights out
of them." At a fund raiser for Illinois Democrats, he showed he
can make the case that America is wasting much of its young
generation. "It's a long, long way in this country from me at
the age of six holding my great-granddaddy's hand to a condition
where children on the streets of this city don't know who their
grandparents are," he said. "If we cannot make common cause with
those kids, we cannot keep the American Dream alive for any of
us."

    As Governor, Clinton has thrown most of his effort into
early-childhood intervention and education. Social Security
numbers are recorded on birth certificates to help trace
deadbeat fathers. He increased teachers' salaries but insisted
on a controversial competency exam. Parents who don't show up
at teacher meetings are fined $50. Starting in 1993, failing
students will not be allowed to get a driver's license. Clinton
has expanded Head Start and launched school-based health clinics
(where condoms are distributed, much to the outrage of the
religious right). While other governors have taken rich states
and made them poor, Clinton has taken a poor state and made it
a bit richer, without crowing about an "Arkansas Miracle." Over
the past decade, per capita income grew 61%. Even so, terrible
poverty remains entrenched in Arkansas: the state's incomes are
still about 25% below the national average.

    As President, Clinton says, he would take much of what he
has tried in Arkansas, add money and stir. He would reform
welfare, education and health care, funding his programs with
reduced defense spending and a 3% savings in administrative
costs. He would increase taxes on those earning more than
$200,000. He would apply to all corporate executives a variation
of the rule devised by Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream: any
income above 25 times what the lowest-paid worker in a company
earns would be taxed at a higher rate.

    On foreign policy, the less said the better -- as is true
for all his Democratic rivals. Clinton has shown a little
foreign policy leg on trade missions abroad, and he was the only
Democratic candidate to support the Persian Gulf war
unequivocally. He thinks the isolationism and protectionism
being thumped by several Democrats as well as Republican Pat
Buchanan are shortsighted. He prefers to move the discussion
back to domestic policy as quickly as Bush gets onto a plane to
avoid it. Economic growth, Clinton argues, is the solution. "The
Soviet Union didn't disintegrate from attack by outside forces
but from stagnation within."

    On the subject of welfare, Clinton, the moderate
Southerner, is yin to Cuomo's Northeastern liberal yang. In
Clinton's world, there is not a program for every problem. He
cut Arkansas' relief rolls 7%, and part of his platform is to
restrict payments to chronic recipients. He favors cuts not only
to save money but because living on the dole can instill
self-destructive values. Welfare, says Clinton, "should be a
second chance, not a way of life." He tells dependent mothers
to stop having children if they're not prepared to support them,
because "governments don't raise children, people do." A
Democrat uttering such sentiments would have been drummed out
of the party a few years ago, but the deepening culture of
dependency has made an emphasis on personal responsibility
palatable even to liberals.

    Though he has taken on the gun lobby by supporting
legislation to restrict firearms and annoyed abortion activists
by backing parental notification, Clinton has a reputation in
Arkansas for trying to please everyone. John Brummett, a
columnist in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, says Clinton's
"desire to be loved is unhealthy, even for a politician." Back
in office in 1983, Clinton rewarded his opponents on the right
by approving home schooling and signing more than 100 corporate
tax breaks.

    But a mean streak, unlike happiness, is something money
can buy, as Bush demonstrated when he hired Roger Ailes to
de-wimp him in 1988. Clinton's hired gun is James Carville, the
Democratic version of G.O.P spin doctor Lee Atwater. Carville
just helped the darkest of horses, Harris Wofford, destroy
former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh's 44-point lead and win
a U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania.

    Carville's first job may be to ward off overconfidence by
spinning the candidate's own expectations lower. That will not
be easy in the face of all the head-swelling raves coming in --
even from Republicans. In December, Clinton was invited to
breakfast by 60 California executives, several of whom had
contributed as much as $100,000 to the 1988 Bush campaign. A few
are hedging their bets this time around by pledging money to
Clinton.

    Just before Lee Atwater died last year, he wrote in LIFE
that he had finally discovered that "what was missing in
society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of
brotherhood . . . I don't know who will lead us through the
'90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum
at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul." Front
runners are not generally given to such musings, which tend to
come with a few lines in the face, a few more bumps in the
road. The next months will tell whether Clinton is just another
whiz kid turned fortysomething, bored with being
Governor-for-life and looking for a bigger stage, or if he has
the depth to fill the hollows in America's soul.