Clinton Endorsed by Washington Post : Media: It says he offers ‘stronger hope for the future.’ But the Detroit News says Bush is the better choice.

The Washington Post endorsed Democrat Bill Clinton for President on Sunday, saying President Bush “has long since squandered whatever claim he had to national leadership.”

Clinton also picked up an endorsement from the Charlotte Observer, which called Bush a “prisoner of the status quo.”

Bush, meanwhile, was endorsed by the Detroit News, which said it wasn’t enthusiastic about his performance but thought that Clinton could do worse.

“Four more years of George Bush may not be pretty. But four years of Bill Clinton . . . could be even less appetizing,” the News said Sunday.

“We were among those who hoped in 1988 that he knew better than he spoke,” the Post said of Bush, adding that “after the propitiatory rites of the campaign his better nature might prevail.”

“To some degree in his first years in office it did,” the Post’s editorial said. It credited Bush with accomplishments in federal aid to the poor, child care and the rights of the disabled and praised “the stout budget agreement that he achieved with Congress at the expense of his no-new-taxes pledge.”

“But in the past two years, he has lost it,” the newspaper said. It said Bush did well in prosecuting the war against Iraq but less well in dealing with the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Domestically, it said, Bush “has nothing useful left to say” on such issues as the economy, child poverty and soaring health care costs.

The Post said the Arkansas governor and his running mate, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, “offer by far the stronger hope for the future.”

“His 12 years as governor are what define him much more than his earlier years as a student or even the months he has now spent on the campaign trail,” it said of Clinton. “They are the heart of his record and offer the best means of judging his likely performance in national office. Contrary to the campaign rhetoric of his opponents, that record is by and large a solid, substantial one, promising for a prospective President.”

The Detroit News said it is “tempting” to condemn Bush for his economic performance but that things could easily get worse.

“For that reason, we endorse President Bush for reelection, not with great enthusiasm but out of solid conviction that he is the best available choice for the job,” the editorial said.

“Not all or even most of our economic frustrations can be laid at Mr. Bush’s door,” the News said.

The newspaper said Bush also should be supported because the next President could be called upon to fill three Supreme Court vacancies and a Clinton presidency “would open the doors for a return to the kind of woolly-minded judicial imperialism that would further undermine American institutions.”

The Charlotte newspaper praised Clinton’s promise to take on the nation’s biggest problems and make fiscal responsibility a higher priority.

“As governor of Arkansas, he is well-schooled in the agony arising from a lack of good jobs,” the Observer said. “He has shown that he knows how to run a government and how to unite opposing factions behind a plan for action.”

The Observer criticized Bush as presiding over the three largest annual budget deficits in history.

“Mr. Bush could not have prevented all these problems, but his response to them gives no reason for confidence,” the newspaper said.

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in Philadelphia; Wilmington, Del., and Charlotte, N.C.

President Bush campaigns in Springfield, Pa., and Holland, Mich.

Ross Perot has no public events scheduled.