Editorial Page staff
The Seattle Times
President Bill Clinton should be re-elected to a second term. Despite this somewhat dispiriting campaign, he emerges as the obvious choice to lead the country into the next century. On a more parochial level,
Clinton also is the candidate best able to nurture the interests of the Pacific Northwest and Washington state.
For all his years as a legislative leader and master of the artful compromise that makes government work, Bob Dole has made no convincing case to voters about why he should be president.
Clinton is running a safe campaign. Having declared early this year the era of big government is over, he is staying true to that course with a campaign of small ideas. Curfews, school uniforms and television V-chips may be fodder for critics and comedians, but, in fact, little things do add up, especially for education.
Sensing a public more in the mood for pragmatic solutions than grand gestures, Clinton has stressed a series of common-sense steps: federal assistance for computers in schools; reading tutors; tax credits and deductions for college tuition. Equally important, he has used the bully pulpit of his office to preach the essential values of public education. If there is any substance at all to Clinton's metaphor of a bridge to the future, it is education.
On this topic, Dole is plainly overmatched. It seems never to have occurred to him that education is a topic suited for presidential leadership. He offers little more than ideologically laced notions such as vouchers. For all the talk about bringing free-market principles to education, a voucher is nothing more than a diversion of tax money from public schools (and the many efforts to improve them) to private schools.
But we are not, after all, choosing the nation's school superintendent. What about all the rest? On the economy, Dole might have had the edge, based on his Senate record as a responsible voice on tax policy and federal spending. Then, as if repudiating all those sensible years in the U.S. Senate, Dole adopted a goofy scheme for tax cuts without carefully matched spending cuts.
Clinton doesn't deserve all the credit for a national economy that is chugging along quite nicely, but he deserves some. For all the chaos of his first two years in office, it was the 1993 Clinton budget that began to reduce the federal deficit built up in the Reagan-Bush years with the help of Democratic Congresses.
On foreign policy, Clinton's record is decidedly mixed, ranging from a lethal failure in Somalia to a historic breakthrough in the Middle East. In Bosnia, the administration fiddled on the sidelines for two years, then provided the decisive leadership that ended the bloodshed. A false start
with the Haitian refugee crisis eventually ended with the restoration of democracy,
though poverty keeps the situation explosive. Clinton's pragmatic relationship with China allowed him to challenge bellicose behavior toward Taiwan, while he propped open a door for trade.
The singular success - but very much a work in progress - was to help nurture a fragile democracy and economic transformation in the former Soviet Union. Grave hazards lurk in the instability there, but tensions that defined superpower relations for nearly half a century no longer exist.
Unfortunately, none of this has been examined on the campaign trail, and Dole's views are largely unknown.
Clinton has been a very good president for the Pacific Northwest. He gave the region Option 9, a compromise plan
for managing federal forests that nobody really liked but that ended the timber wars. His grasp of trade issues,
particularly Pacific Rim trade and the impact on the state's economy, is remarkable. He convinced doubters with his dazzling leadership of the November 1993 APEC meeting in Seattle.
And the next four years? There is reason for concern about a second Clinton administration. The character issue
continues to linger in the shadows of his presidency. Name your scandal -- Whitewater,
womanizing, travel office - any of them could still blow up, even though in two years of trying, the GOP has yet to find the fuse that will ignite the public. Of greatest concern, however, are questions about possible misuse of FBI files. Potential wrongdoing in that matter goes to the heart of conduct and leadership from the White House.
One of the surprises of this campaign is that Dole has not been able to move voters with his presumed advantage on the character issue.
In a second term, Clinton must deal with the reality of having ended welfare as we know it. The old system is gone, but its clients --
mostly poor women and their children -- remain. The president now must work with governors of both parties
and the private sector to see that the transition from welfare to work is more than a hollow political slogan.
Ultimately, the greatest challenge facing the next president and the new Congress is entitlement reforms,
particularly Social Security and Medicare. If Clinton is looking for more than a bridge to the next century,
if he wants a path into the history books, that's where he could find it.
