Bill Clinton: Questions Questions Questions

IS IT POSSIBLE FOR A CANDIDATE TO win a presidential nomination while convincing even many of his own party’s strongest partisans that he does not / have the honesty and integrity to lead the nation? It would seem a wildly implausible accomplishment (if that is the word). Yet Bill Clinton is coming closer and closer to pulling it off. His primary victories last week in New York, Wisconsin and Kansas, while far from overwhelming, further padded what already looked like an insurmountable lead in delegates. Moreover, former Senator Paul Tsongas’ refusal to re-enter the race, despite his unexpectedly strong second-place showing in New York, virtually ensured that anyone-but- Clinton sentiment will remain unfocused, rather than coalescing around an appealing rival.

Rarely if ever have party voters approached their choice with so many misgivings. Only 50% of New York Democrats questioned as they left primary voting booths said Clinton had the honesty to be President; 46% thought he did not. That was only a bit higher than the proportion expressing qualms in exit polls in earlier primaries.

If Clinton stirs so much doubt even among the most committed Democrats, how will he be regarded by the broader electorate he must appeal to in order to defeat George Bush? A TIME/CNN poll of 937 registered voters questioned by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman last Thursday — two days after Clinton’s primary victories — gives some startling answers. A month earlier, Clinton finished in a dead heat with Bush, 43% to 43%; now he loses by 11 points, 44% to 33% (a jump in the undecided column made most of the difference). In a three-way race, Clinton barely edges Texas billionaire Ross Perot, 25% to 21%, with Bush pulling 40%. It is rare enough for a candidate not to get a bounce in the polls after winning some major primaries; to lose ground is almost unheard of. Some reasons for the deterioration: asked if Clinton is “someone you can trust,” respondents voted 59% no to 28% yes. Questioned more specifically as to whether Clinton is “honest and trustworthy enough to be President, 53% said no and 39% yes — vs. a 59% yes to 37% no vote for Bush on the same question.

A further indication of serious trouble brewing for Clinton: “the character issue,” as it is generally though imprecisely called, has begun drawing the sardonic and sometimes fatal attention of those interpreters of the zeitgeist, TV’s late-night talk-show hosts. Sample gibe from Johnny Carson: “Clinton experimented with marijuana, but he said he didn’t inhale and didn’t enjoy it. That’s the trouble with the Democrats. Even when they do something wrong, they don’t do it right.”

. Even amid the glow of his primary victories last week, Clinton rather plaintively acknowledged that he had to do a better job of convincing voters he is an honest man. Some well-wishers go further. “Clinton is going to have to find some forum in which he confronts these character questions directly,” says former Democratic National Chairman John White. He has in mind something like John F. Kennedy’s televised confrontation with Protestant ministers in Houston that defused concerns about his Roman Catholicism — and its supposed influence on his policies — early in the 1960 campaign. Natalie Davis, a political-science professor at Birmingham-Southern College, draws a different analogy. Says she: “At some strategic moment in the fall, he’s going to have to give a sort of Checkers speech ((referring to the 1952 TV talk by Richard Nixon, rebutting slush-fund charges, that saved his vice-presidential candidacy)), and it will have to be dynamite. The great thing is that Bill Clinton is totally capable of delivering it.”

Maybe so. Clinton already has won the surprised admiration of many pols for surviving allegations that would long since have scuttled many another campaign. Yet for the candidate and his supporters, the massive mistrust he has aroused is maddeningly difficult to counter because it stems from so many sources. It can no longer be dispelled by refuting specific charges — not all of which are terribly important anyway. There are some indications that more voters are troubled by allegations of adultery and draft evasion than will admit it to pollsters. But youthful experimentation with pot is a proven non- issue in the case of candidates who admit it straightforwardly; it had no effect on the 1988 campaigns of Bruce Babbitt or Albert Gore Jr. or the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And probably not 1 voter in 50 could even say just what are the questions that have been raised about Clinton’s financial dealings.

Far outweighing any specific issue is the cumulative impression made by the sheer number of them. Says Mervin Field, conductor of the respected California Poll: “If it was just marital infidelity, ((voters)) might have excused that, but the cumulative weight of that and everything else is too much. The degree of uncomfortableness is increasing day by day.” Even while endorsing Clinton last month, former President Jimmy Carter lamented that the “volume and repetition of charges against him have created an image that he’s not $ trustworthy” — most unfairly, in Carter’s view.

Among political insiders too, the volume and repetition of charges have created a kind of shell-shocked wariness as to what revelation or pseudo- revelation might be coming next. There are indications that this fear is keeping Clinton from sewing up the nomination as early as he might have. It is not at all certain that the Arkansas Governor can win enough delegates in the remaining primaries and caucuses to give him the 2,145 votes necessary. To nail down the prize, he may eventually need a heavy majority of the so-called superdelegates — basically elected officials and party bigwigs. But though the Clinton campaign claims the support of more than 200 of the 772 superdelegates, there was no rush among the remainder to jump aboard his bandwagon, even after his victories last week.

California Representative Don Edwards held a meeting last week of 17 congressional Democrats who, like him, are superdelegates. They agreed, he says, that Clinton’s nomination now looks inevitable but that nonetheless they would stay uncommitted at least for the moment. One reason, says Edwards — who stresses that he personally has no doubts about Clinton’s honesty — is that “you always wonder if another shoe will drop.” The situation has reached the somewhat absurd stage of rumors about allegations. Talk circulated around Chicago last week that some really damaging charges — nature unspecified — were about to become public, and it may have scared off some superdelegates from signing up with Clinton just yet.

Among both ordinary voters and political cognoscenti, a great deal of the uneasiness about Clinton reflects his propensity to dance away from straightforward yes or no answers to any character question. He relies instead on legalistic, artfully phrased and heavily nuanced replies that may be technically accurate but also misleading. The resulting belief that he is incurably evasive has probably damaged Clinton far more than any specific issue. It ties in with a not very specific but nonetheless widely felt discomfort about his calculated ambition (he says he has wanted to be President since he was a teenager) and some alleged shifts of position on policy. At least among some people, these factors create a general impression of insincerity, of a synthetic politician who will do or say anything to become President. In fact, 67% of those questioned in last week’s TIME/CNN poll said exactly that: Clinton “would say anything to get elected President.” That at least partly reflected a sour suspicion of all politicians; 60% voiced the same opinion about Bush.

Clinton’s admirers put much blame for Clinton’s woes on print and TV journalists who, in their view, have been harping on largely trivial questions of character while ignoring the policy issues that are Clinton’s strength. Result: the voters who have heard about Gennifer Flowers vastly outnumber those who have any idea that Clinton has put forth a highly detailed program on taxes and the economy, let alone those who have any notion of what his program contains. There is some truth to this, but given public attitudes, it is largely inevitable. Political scientist James David Barber of Duke University observes that many voters say to themselves, “I don’t really know what the deficit means. Ido know what adultery means.”

To some extent, Clinton may be suffering merely from being a newcomer to the national spotlight — and one who quickly got tabbed as the Democratic front runner, thus assuring himself of exceptionally early and intense scrutiny. Clinton’s wife Hillary recently wondered aloud why George Bush was not also being relentlessly pummeled about his character. Though she quickly apologized for raising the particular issue that she did — whispers, never substantiated, that Bush had had an extramarital affair — she had a point. Why has Bush not been questioned incessantly about his son Neil’s involvement with a savings and loan association that failed because of unsound banking practices? About his knowledge of possibly illegal and unconstitutional Iran- contra activities? About his flip-flops on abortion, taxes, Saddam Hussein and many other issues? About the widepread impression that he has no strong beliefs about anything except his own ability to fill the Oval Office? The answer, probably, is that Bush has been around long enough for people to feel they know as much about him, good or bad, as they need to; unanswered questions left over from past campaigns are regarded as old news. And voters do not have to guess what kind of President Bush is likely to be, as they must with Clinton; they can form their judgments on the basis of Bush’s record through more than three years in office.

Clinton may also be suffering more than his rivals, and more than past candidates, from the backlash of anger against all politics and politicians, which has been far stronger in this campaign than ever before. In another election cycle, the Governor might have profited from his reputation as a master politician who has shown a rare ability in Arkansas to convince often clashing interests that he is on their side. Clinton’s defenders like to point out that the now sainted Franklin D. Roosevelt was often regarded in his day as a crafty politician promising something for everybody. But 1992 is the worst possible year to be called “Slick Willie” — the nickname invented by opponents of Clinton in Arkansas that he detests but has never been able to shake.

The specific accusations against Clinton are a mixed bag, involving two kinds of “character” questions. One set focuses on private character — allegations of adultery and marijuana smoking, for example — that have no correlation to presidential performance, except for whatever a candidate’s comments about them reveal as to his general honesty or lack of it. Regrettably, this group of problems has received the most attention because it is — well, sexier than questions about what might be called public character. These are matters such as conflict-of-interest situations and how a candidate might carry out the duties of office. The common denominator is that Clinton’s answers to all these questions have generally been ineffective. In fact, worse than ineffective: They have sometimes got him into deeper trouble than he was in before. Some details:

INFIDELITY

Clinton’s general strategy has been four-part: 1) in effect, admit to adultery without actually using the words by repeatedly conceding that his marriage to Hillary has gone through periods of severe strain; 2) insist that they have patched things up and their marriage is now solid; 3) deny the specific allegations by Gennifer Flowers of a 12-year affair with him; and 4) refuse to answer any questions about other women on the grounds, essentially, that if Hillary is satisfied, it is no one else’s business.

There are some indications that this line is succeeding in convincing voters, whether or not they believe his denials of involvement with Flowers, that the matter is a closed book, with nothing more to be said, and not terribly important anyway. When Phil Donahue persisted in grilling him about adultery, Clinton won vociferous applause from the studio audience by informing the TV host that they would all “sit for a long time in silence” if Donahue did not get onto something else. But there are also hints that the issue is helping open a gender gap against Clinton. Illinois pollster J. Michael McKeon reports that dissatisfaction with Clinton is highest among women ages 18 to 44, and Sue Purrington, executive director of the Chicago chapter of the National Organization for Women, says “about 80%” of the women who talk politics with her have expressed serious reservations about the Arkansas Governor. Though she attributes these to the character issue generally rather than allegations of adultery specifically, she goes on to talk about “a gut-level feeling of distaste for his life-style, which is perceived as morally not upstanding. Women tend to feel that one’s moral character is a whole element, that if somebody is doing something morally unacceptable, it affects that person’s judgment on other issues.”

MARIJUANA

A truly trivial issue, revealing only because it illustrates Clinton’s penchant for legalistic evasiveness. Questioned about pot smoking, Clinton first said he had never broken U.S. or state laws — an answer clearly designed to convey the impression that he had never tried the weed, without his actually saying so. When someone finally asked the obvious question — what about while he was abroad? — Clinton confessed that he had smoked marijuana as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the late ’60s but felt compelled to add that not only had he not liked it, he had not even inhaled — an assertion that many others who had smoked marijuana, then and later, found hilariously unbelievable. Clinton could have avoided the whole brouhaha, and what is threatening to become grist for a million late-night-TV jokes, by just saying “Yes, and so what?” the first time he was asked.

THE DRAFT

A far more serious affair. Just when Clinton might have thought he had put it to rest, a letter surfaced last week dated May 8, 1969, and written by Cliff Jackson, then a fellow Rhodes scholar and now a bitter political opponent of Clinton’s in Arkansas. In it, Jackson informed a friend back in the U.S. that Clinton “received his induction notice last week.” Clinton, who earlier said he was never actually drafted, now asserted that yes, he received an induction letter in England. It came by surface mail, he said, and specified a date that had already passed; he got in touch with his local draft board and was told he could finish his term at Oxford. He did not mention it before, he said in essence, because he had just forgotten about it.

But who could forget a draft notice? At any rate, the basic story does not change: torn between opposition to what he regarded as an immoral war in Vietnam and his sense of duty to country, Clinton kept himself out of the draft for a few crucial months by enrolling in an ROTC unit at the University of Arkansas that he never actually joined; he eventually gave up that deferment but drew such a high lottery number that he was never inducted.

Whatever they may think of the war, many Americans would readily sympathize with the young Clinton’s moral turmoil about it; he was certainly not the only member of his generation to do everything he legally could to stay out. But even some of his supporters have trouble swallowing Clinton’s contention that his eventual decision to submit to the draft was a moral act, when he wrote at the time that he wanted — even at the age of 23 — to maintain his future “political viability.” The latest dustup about what kind of letter he received in England can only reinforce an impression that he is saying whatever he judges to be expedient.

SEGREGATED GOLF

Clinton has made no attempt to justify playing a round of golf during the present campaign at the Country Club of Little Rock, which has no black members; he has said it was a mistake that he will not repeat. But his explanation of why he did it sounds distressingly lame: he and his hosts were in a hurry, and it was the only place they could reach in time. Nobody thinks Clinton is a racist; his pledges to try to heal white-vs.-black enmity are among the most attractive aspects of his campaign — especially in contrast to past Republican appeals to whites’ racial fears. But the episode does suggest even to some friendly observers that Clinton may consider himself above the restraints that apply to other people. He knows he is not a racist, and sneaking in a quick round of golf at a convenient country club will not change that, so why not?

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Essentially, there are two issues. One is that in 1978, when Clinton was Arkansas attorney general, he and Hillary invested in Whitewater Development Co., a corporation that planned to sell lots for vacation homes. They maintained their investment even after 1982, when Jim McDougal, head of Whitewater, became majority owner of the now defunct Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, which was regulated by the state Clinton shortly was elected to govern. (After winning his first two-year gubernatorial term in 1978, Clinton lost his 1980 bid.) The other is that Hillary was a partner in the Rose Law Firm, which represented clients before the state government that her husband headed. Clinton has replied that he and Hillary never made any money out of their investment in Whitewater — in fact, his lawyer has said they lost almost $69,000 — and Hillary relinquished any share in her law firm’s income from clients doing business with the state.

That defense seems to miss two points about at least the appearance of impropriety: a Governor should not be a business partner of a man subject to regulation by the state administration; and clients with state business to transact might choose a law firm they thought had influence with the administration — and who would have more influence than the Governor’s wife?

POLICY SHIFTS

Clinton has raised more than a few eyebrows by campaigning first as a centrist — when he expected his principal opposition for the Democratic nomination to come from the liberal Mario Cuomo — and then as a more traditional liberal, when he lost New Hampshire to Tsongas’ attack from the right. Actually, these switches amounted to little more than the tactical shifts between what to emphasize and what to downplay that all politicians make and that are fairly legitimate, so long as they do not involve switches in actual positions — which Clinton generally has not made. Even so, he has opened himself to Tsongas’ bitter charge of pandering. In Southern TV ads, he assailed Tsongas for proposing a slower increase in the pensions of well-off Social Security recipients — even though Clinton knows that some such action will be necessary if the federal deficit is ever to be brought under control (in fact, Tsongas’ stand was not very different from one Clinton had taken in the past).

Individually, none of these matters might seem of overwhelming importance. Taken together, they build up a picture of evasiveness that is starting to dominate the political debate. And the pity is that Clinton has detailed programs on taxes, investment, job creation, race relations, and educational and welfare reform that deserve far more debate than they are getting.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 937 registered voters taken for TIME/CNN on April 9 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3.2%.

CAPTION: Is Bill Clinton honest and trustworthy enough to be President?

Is Clinton someone who would say anything to get elected?

Is Clinton someone you would be proud to have as President?