A Gamble That Could Work for Clinton : Politics: He should call for an open convention lest his party face the absolute humiliation of winding up third in November.

Bill Clinton will meet today on Capitol Hill with super-delegates to the Democratic National Convention. He will be trying to persuade them that his nomination as the party’s presidential candidate is inevitable and that the time has come for them to board his ship, which many of them fear would be akin to booking passage on the Titanic.

In asking the super-delegates to endorse him, Clinton will be following conventional politics at a time when his prospects for winning the general election depend on his making a daring, dramatic, unconventional move.

If Clinton and the Democratic Party stay on their current course, they may well face a debacle in November that would be unprecedented even in the recent sorry history of Democratic presidential campaigns. When opinion polls ask if the Arkansas governor is sufficiently trustworthy to be President, more than half of the respondents say no. And this is before the Republicans have begun their attack ads. During the month of his great triumphs, Clinton fell from being even with or slightly ahead of President Bush in national polls to trailing him by 11 to 16 points--and this while Bush’s own approval rating was continuing to decline. But the truly catastrophic prospect for Democrats is the emergence of independent Ross Perot; although he is not yet an announced candidate, Perot ran 6 points ahead of Clinton, almost tying Bush, in this week’s Los Angeles Times Poll of California voters.

The specter that now haunts the Democrats is that if they go ahead in conventional fashion with the nomination of Bill Clinton, the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Roosevelt and Kennedy could finish third in a presidential election.

Such a chilling possibility demands that the party--and the man who appears to be headed for a nomination that could end in the humiliation of a third-place finish--abandon fatalism and take bold action.

Rather than pleading for the super-delegates’ endorsement, Clinton should do something startling: He should ask them to remain uncommitted and himself issue a call for an open convention. All delegates would be released from their pledges and free to support anyone on the first ballot of the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden in July.

Such a dramatic action by Clinton, putting his candidacy seriously at risk, may sound mad. Delegates free to vote for whomever they thought best able to lead the party into the fall campaign might well turn to someone who had not actively participated in the primaries, such as Mario Cuomo, Lloyd Bentsen, Al Gore, Richard Gephardt, Bill Bradley, Sam Nunn or Jay Rockefeller.

But an open convention would in no way preclude the nomination of Clinton--and it might provide the only means by which he could put himself in a position to be seriously considered by a majority of voters in the fall.

In an open convention, the deck would still be stacked in Clinton’s favor, since the largest bloc of delegates would be people who endorsed him early in the campaign. But such a convention would allow delegates to have another look at Clinton, his record as governor and the charges that have been made against him. They would also be evaluating his rehabilitation on the character issue, which he must undertake between now and the convention. If a majority of the delegates went ahead and chose Clinton, their new endorsement--made freely after they had weighed the criticism of him and his rebuttal--would make him a much stronger candidate for the fall.

Emerging as the choice of an open convention would also enable Clinton to make the case that he was not simply the nominee by default. It would mean that, in addition to having defeated Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, Tom Harkin and Bob Kerrey, he had also been chosen over all the other, potentially stronger nominees who might have been drafted by the open convention.

One of the raps against Clinton is that he will do or say anything to get elected (a malady that would not distinguish him from Bush). Calling for an open convention would help to remove questions about Clinton’s hunger for power. It would demonstrate that he is more concerned about altering the direction of the nation and saving it from the irresponsible policies of the last two Presidents than he is about getting into the White House.

Precisely because it would be so daring and risky, it is unlikely that Clinton will call for an open convention. But such a convention is the best hope--perhaps the only hope--the Democrats have of winning this year. If Clinton is not bold enough to support an open convention, it is up to the super-delegates, delegates committed to other candidates and other party leaders to take the initiative and call for this party-saving move. They must realize that any candidate--Bill Clinton or someone else--chosen by a free, open convention is likely to be far stronger in November than Clinton will be if he appears to be a candidate chosen without enthusiasm, by default, through a process that simply has not worked this year.