Key Republicans Split on Clinton Moscow Trip Issue

Rep. Robert K. Dornan, the Orange County congressman who “begged” President Bush to attack Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton as a traitor and liar, said Saturday that Bush will lose his reelection bid if he backs away from the issue of Clinton’s 1969 trip to Moscow.

“If he backs away from it, he loses. Period,” Dornan (R-Garden Grove) said on CNN’s “Newsmakers Saturday” television show.

But Rep. Vin Weber (R-Minn.), co-chairman of the Bush campaign committee, suggested that Bush may have made a mistake by personally questioning Clinton’s activities as a student in England in 1969. Clinton has said that those activities included a 40-day trip around Europe, including a stop in Moscow.

“I would have told the President that he should not talk about the issue,” said Weber, who added that he had not been consulted on the strategy. “I think he took a great risk, himself, talking about it. I think the President needs to keep focused on the economy,” Weber said in a separate CNN interview.

The contrasting comments illustrate the conflict within Republican circles as to whether Bush helped or hurt himself by raising the issue. In a television interview Wednesday night, Bush said that Clinton needs to “level with the American people” about his student days as a Vietnam War protester and his 1969 trip to Moscow.

“I don’t want to tell you what I really think,” Bush added.

The President and Dornan have conceded that they have no evidence that Clinton’s Moscow visit was other than he described it: a student’s trip as a tourist to the Soviet capital.

In recent weeks, Dornan, an Air Force pilot during the mid-1950s and a photographer during the Vietnam War era, has been making fiery attack speeches on the House floor against the Arkansas governor. In Saturday’s interview, for example, he referred to Clinton as “a constant tax-raising, big-spending, draft-dodging, womanizing, pathological liar.”

Dornan followed that up by calling the Democratic candidate a “nerdy little flower child peacenik demonstrating against his country.”

Last Tuesday, in a meeting in the Oval Office, Dornan urged the President to go on the attack himself. “We begged him to use this issue,” Dornan said. The next night, the President responded on national television.

Democratic campaign strategists said that the Dornan-Bush link shows that the incumbent is desperate.

“It seems to me the President’s campaign is having a political nervous breakdown,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), a co-chair of the Clinton campaign. She called Bush’s focus on Clinton’s student days a “diversionary tactic” to take attention away from the sagging economy.