Second Opinion / OTHER MEDIA : THE SENTINEL : Enough Nit-Picking; Give President Clinton a Chance

Ordinarily, a newly installed President is given the traditional 100 days “honeymoon” grace period by the public, the politicians, the pundits and the press before his actions begin to get picked apart. With Bill Clinton, however, such is apparently not the case.

Even weeks before his inauguration, Clinton was being dogged by reporters wanting to know how much influence his wife, Hillary, was going to have; would she have more clout than Vice President Al Gore?

Questions, questions, questions. Would he, the press asked, allow homosexuals into the military? Didn’t his selections to top Cabinet posts amount to a form of “quota system”? What took Clinton so long to select his Cabinet anyway? Was he reneging on a promise to the Haitians by “temporarily” adopting outgoing President Bush’s position in order to “deter an expected Haitian armada”?

Why, why, why, the press and others kept asking, were campaign promises now being labeled as “goals”?

Enough of this nit-picking, we say! President Clinton campaigned on the promise that his victory would be the start of a new era. And, as Newsweek reminds us, “nothing less then the end of a dark, cynical time that began after the Kennedy assassination and reached full flower in the Reagan-Bush years. It is an ambitious, expansive, romantic vision: with the end of cynicism comes a national rebirth, the revival of hope.”