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                                                                                NATION, Page 24

How Clinton Ran Arkansas


He won more battles than he lost but rarely upset special-
interest groups in the process

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by Michael Riley/Atlanta and
Richard Woodbury/Little Rock


    What kind of Governor has Bill Clinton been? That
critical question has often been lost in the frenzy of inquiries
about his character, inquiries that frequently produce the next
day's tabloid headline but say little if anything about his
ability to govern. After running Arkansas for 11 years, Clinton
has amassed a rich record that deserves at least as much
discussion among voters as anything else in his life.

    It is not, however, a record that lends itself to easy
summary. As President, Clinton pledges, he would be an agent of
"fundamental change," but in Arkansas he has been quite willing
to reach cozy accommodations with corporate interests and to
work within a regressive tax structure. His priorities have been
clear but scarcely uncontroversial; for example, his aides
readily concede that he has put job creation ahead of cleaning
up the environment. His achievements in improving education have
won justified, though a bit excessive, praise. His welfare
reforms, on the other hand, while well conceived, have suffered
from a lack of follow-through.

    In Clinton's defense, it must be said that Arkansas is
peculiarly difficult to lead. It has long ranked near the
bottom, if not dead last, among all 50 states in most measures
of material and social well-being; so many things needed
improvement that only Superman could have accomplished them all
at once. And the state constitution ensures that no Governor
will ever resemble Superman. The chief executive's powers are
strictly limited by a weak veto. To get anything positive
accomplished, he must win the consent of an often balky
legislature and entrenched industries that are frequently
intransigent.

    These restraints -- and an early defeat for re-election in
1980 after initial liberal reforms had antagonized a number of
interests, including the powerful timber and utility industries
-- have reinforced Clinton's natural bent toward conciliation
and compromise. Critics charge that he has been unwilling to
fight hard even for programs that he knows are needed if they
encounter strong opposition. Allies say he has shown a shrewd
ability to focus on the attainable while avoiding battles he
could not win. In any case, his record is a mixture of major
accomplishments and severe disappointments. Some specifics:

    ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT. This has perhaps been Clinton's top
priority; only education could compete with it. The Governor has
engineered a series of tax breaks for business that have totaled
$150 million since 1983 (on top of already low taxes on
corporations). Most important are provisions that permit
manufacturers to claim 7% of their new investments against their
sales-tax liabilities and that also exempt some of their
equipment purchases from the sales taxes outright. The
Governor's aides claim that the concessions have helped spur
$8.2 billion of investment in new or expanded plants and have
worked mightily to promote a 19% increase in manufacturing jobs.

    While luring new industry is certainly a defensible --
indeed inevitable -- goal for a dirt-poor Southern state,
Clinton's relations with organized labor have at times been
testy. Critics charge that Clinton has given away too much
through the concessions, continued a tax structure that unfairly
favors business over middle-class wage earners and fostered a
low-wage, antiunion climate. In 1990 the Arkansas Industrial
Development Commission, run by Clinton appointees, arranged a
$300,000 loan for Morrilton Plastics, a company that made parts
for Detroit automakers, enabling it to build up inventory in
anticipation of a strike by the United Auto Workers. At the
time, the loan outraged union activists. Bill Becker, head of
the state AFL-CIO, bluntly accuses the Clinton administration
of "union busting."

    ENVIRONMENT. Clinton has been notably reluctant to fight
the state's industries on environmental issues. During his
first two-year term, beginning in 1978, he tried to limit
clear-cutting -- the practice by lumber companies of chopping
down all the trees in a stand of forest -- but that aroused the
antagonism of the timber industry, and its opposition
contributed to his 1980 defeat for re-election. Since resuming
office in 1983, Clinton has done virtually nothing to hinder
clear-cutting on the 82% of Arkansas forest land that is
privately owned. In the case of the Ouachita National Forest,
he has backed a plan by the U.S. Forest Service that would
restrict clear-cutting, but nowhere near enough to please such
environmental groups as the Sierra Club, which has filed suit.

    Much more dangerous is pollution caused by the poultry
industry, the most dominant in Arkansas. Growers have been
dumping tons of dried chicken excrement, known as litter, on
croplands in the northwestern part of the state. "We're well
past the land's capacity to accept the waste," says Robert
Leflar, a Sierra Club official; he and others fear the litter
will seep through porous limestone and contaminate streams and
groundwater. Clinton in 1990 appointed an animal-waste task
force to look into the problem (a favorite tactic: his first
move in almost any crisis is to appoint a task force or study
commission), but it has yet to recommend any action.

    Some skeptics wonder whether the inactivity might reflect
Clinton's friendship with poultry baron Don Tyson, chairman of
mammoth (annual sales: $4 billion) Tyson Foods, the state's
largest business employer. Tyson and his family have contributed
heavily to Clinton's campaigns and provided free transportation
to the Governor and his wife in company planes -- an example of
the frequent chumminess between Southern Governors and major
industrialists. Environmentalists generally doubt that any crude
payoff is involved. They think Clinton genuinely -- though in
their view, mistakenly -- fears that strict environmental
regulation will cost the state badly needed employment. Says Tom
cKinney, director of Northwest Arkansas Guardianship, an
environmental organization: "Jobs are paramount to him."

    EDUCATION. By now it has become a much more than
twice-told tale, but familiarity should not dull the glow of
Clinton's greatest accomplishment. In 1978 one study found
Arkansas' schools to be the worst in the nation, bar none.
Realizing that Arkansas could never break out of its cycle of
poverty and backwardness without a drastic improvement in
schooling, the Governor appointed his wife Hillary to head a
panel that would recommend reforms, and this was one task force
that got results. Acting on its advice, Clinton set tough
standards, which every school had to meet, instituted competency
tests for teachers over the initial opposition of teacher
organizations, and eventually sharply increased state funding
for the schools.

    As a result, the state has jumped from near dead last to
third in the percentage of its total state and local budget
earmarked for schooling. The proportion of Arkansas high school
students going on to college has jumped from 39% in 1981 to 51%
now, roughly in line with the national average. Today all
school districts conduct high school courses in physics,
chemistry and foreign languages -- a point noted last week by
the New York Times in a five-part series that reflects a general
turning in the media from "gotcha" exposes to more substantive
explorations of candidates' records.

    True enough, some of the state's educational
accomplishments have been oversold; there are negative
statistics too. The much touted competency test was not
difficult, and teachers could take it again and again until they
finally passed. Scores achieved by Arkansas high schoolers on
standard college tests have remained stagnant, and a dismaying
60% of those who do get into college require remedial
instruction once they arrive. But no one would deny that the
state's schools have improved and that Clinton deserves much of
the credit.

    WELFARE. Project Success, Clinton's program to offer
schooling, job training and work experience to welfare
recipients, aims in the right direction but has hardly had
enough small success to justify its name. Since the program's
start in 1989, 6,000 people have been taken off welfare rolls,
but many have returned. Meanwhile, Arkansas' welfare case loads
have been growing about as much as those of other states. The
recession certainly has not helped open jobs for welfare
mothers, but Clinton's critics say the program's troubles also
reflect one of the Governor's frequent failings: he is a much
better idea man than administrator and frequently does not
devote enough attention to making sure that his ideas are
carried out. In the case of welfare, says Brownie Ledbetter, a
citizen activist, "he gathered a bunch of people together and
said, `Go do it' and then disappeared."

    Among other administrative foul-ups, inadequate
transportation allowances have prevented welfare recipients in
some rural areas from reaching training centers located far from
their homes. Critics contend that the program would have been
more successful if the resources devoted to it had been more
focused in problem areas along the Mississippi and around Little
Rock rather than scattered over all 75 Arkansas counties. But
Clinton calculated that for political reasons he could not leave
anybody out; if he had, says Ledbetter, "that would have made
people mad."

    TAXES. Liberals' loudest complaint against Clinton is that
he took office in a state that already had a regressive tax
system (it weighed more heavily on the poor and middle class
than on the wealthy) and has gone along with making it more
regressive still. The Governor has not been able to reform
significantly the state's income tax structure. He has failed
to raise the severance tax on timber, coal, oil and natural gas.
To raise revenue for his education and other reforms, Clinton
has requested and won two increases in the sales tax, which
raises 40% of the state's revenue. A particularly objectionable
feature: Arkansas is one of the few states to apply sales taxes
to store-bought food (though not feed for chickens and pigs,
which is exempt as an "industrial input").

    Critics accuse Clinton of backing out of a deal they
thought they had struck with him to rebate sales taxes on food
to the poor when the tax was raised in 1983. Also, as part of
an increase last year that was needed to pay for higher teacher
salaries, the Governor agreed to apply a tax to used cars, a
major expenditure for many low- and middle-income Arkansans.
"This is the man out there telling everyone he's for the middle
class," says John Robert Starr, managing editor of the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette, "and he's hitting the middle class [in
Arkansas] right square where it hurts." Clinton points out that
sales taxes like the one on used cars require only a majority
vote in the legislature, but the state constitution insists on
a hard-to-obtain 75% vote to increase nearly all other levies.
He backed a proposed constitutional amendment in 1988 that would
have set the same requirement -- a 60% vote -- to raise any kind
of tax, but it failed to make it out of a house committee for
a full vote. Critics charge Clinton failed to put up the fight
that would have been necessary to win passage for fear of
offending his business supporters.

    RACE RELATIONS. Arkansas was once almost synonymous with
segregation; President Eisenhower in 1957 had to call out the
National Guard to protect black students admitted to Central
High School in Little Rock over the opposition of Governor Orval
Faubus. Clinton has sought with some success to bring blacks
into the power structure: he has appointed far more blacks to
state government departments, commissions and agencies than any
other Governor in Arkansas' history. The Governor also has
sought to foster black enterprise by directing state agencies
to place at least 10% of their purchase orders with
minority-owned businesses. Once again, follow-through has been
less than vigorous, and it is estimated that only about 3% of
state purchases have actually been made from minority
businessmen.

    Though the state's success in attracting new industry has
helped reduce black unemployment, from 19.5% in 1982 to 17.5%
last year, the reduction has been smaller than in some
neighboring Southern states; much of the industry has tended to
cluster in the predominantly white northwestern part of the
state. The most surprising part of Arkansas' racial performance
is that the state is one of only two (Alabama is the other) that
do not have a law banning racial discrimination in employment,
and one of nine with no statute outlawing housing
discrimination. Clinton supported a state civil rights bill in
last year's legislative session, but opposition from small
businesses that feared it would be too costly kept it from being
passed. Most black leaders nonetheless have given Clinton credit
for trying, and black votes have helped mightily to propel him
to victory in important primaries this year.

    Though he certainly cannot claim to have worked any
miracles, Clinton can point to some solid accomplishments. A
common saying in Arkansas used to be "Thank God for Mississippi"
-- because if it were not for Mississippi, Arkansas would have
been at the absolute bottom among all 50 states in many measures
of wealth and social progress. Under Clinton, however, the
state has begun inching ahead of some others too and acquiring
a new self-confidence that it can be something more than a
poverty-stricken backwater. "The state is far better off than
before he came along," says Max Howell, who is retiring after
42 years in the Arkansas senate. "He has negotiated the most
meaningful gains that anyone could have." Political scientist
David England at Arkansas State University agrees: "He has been
as effective as any Governor could be in Arkansas," partly
because Clinton has shown a shrewd sense of what reforms were
attainable and concentrated on them. Says England: "He has taken
on only what he thought was possible. Pushing too hard on one
thing would have blown others."

    Setting realistic priorities and putting together the
coalitions to achieve them are obviously skills a President must
possess. But some of Clinton's critics wonder if a President
should not also be a bit more of a crusader than Clinton has
proved himself. In their view, the Governor has been a bit too
quick to settle for what he could get, a bit too reluctant to
antagonize actual or posupporters. "He never wants to move until
he takes a poll; he has retreated where he didn't have to,''
says Tom McRae, a Little Rock lawyer who challenged Clinton in
the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1990. And McRae is not
the only one to ask a sharp question: Could Clinton take on the
special interests that have been blocking needed legislation on
a national level any more effectively than he has stood up to
special interests in Arkansas? The situations of course are not
fully comparable: Clinton would presumably come to power with
a mandate for change and would wield far more power in the Oval
Office than any Governor -- and especially any Governor of
Arkansas -- ever can. Nonetheless, it is a troubling question
that Clinton has not yet put to rest.