Clinton Stumps for Voters--in Militia Hotbed

President Clinton ventured into a stronghold of anti-federal government fervor Thursday to reaffirm his impassioned opposition to rightist militias--and to try to win back disaffected voters in the mountain West.

“I don’t believe that anybody has a right to violate the law or take the law into their own hands against federal officials,” Clinton said in an interview with the Billings Gazette, referring to the armed groups that reject most government authority.

In a daylong visit to this handsome old railroad town of 100,000 on the Yellowstone River, Clinton delivered two messages--one aimed at a national audience, the other at the people of Montana and other mountain states he carried in 1992.

The President’s national message was a reaffirmation of his strong stand against the militias and other extremist groups, an issue that moves him to unusual passion. His position also won him wide public support in the aftermath of the April 19 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, a crime for which two men who have ties to right-wing militias have been charged.

Striking another defiant note, Clinton said he will fight to keep the ban on assault weapons that he pushed through Congress last year, even though it is unpopular in rural states like Montana. White House aides said that the assault-gun ban wins Clinton votes in the nation’s key suburban electoral battlegrounds, votes that outweigh any losses he may suffer in the sparsely populated mountain states.

At the same time, Clinton delivered a plea to voters of the vast region that stretches from the Sierra Nevada across the Rockies: He never meant to start a “war on the West,” as opponents dubbed his policies on federal land use and the environment, and he is more than ready to make peace.

“If I had been trying to wage war on the West, I don’t think the West would have done as well as it has,” he said. “And . . . most of the environmental groups don’t think I’ve been [tough] enough.”

Clinton said that Republican attacks on his Administration for trying to raise grazing fees for ranchers using federal lands have been unfair because he reversed that policy.

“The Interior Department made a mistake,” he said. “They proposed as a negotiating strategy raising the grazing fees too high in 1993. It was wrong. But after strenuous objection by a number of people . . . we immediately dropped it--immediately. That should have been evidence that we weren’t trying to wage war on anybody out here.”

Clinton said that he still wants to change the mining law of 1872 that allows miners to extract minerals from federal lands for royalty payments far below market value, “but I don’t think we should do it to the extent that we put people out of business.”

As for timber issues, he said: “The truth is that the timber people ought to be for me. . . . We are giving landowners, especially small landowners, more flexibility. . . . I am trying to get it where these folks can log again.”

He pointed to an Interior Department decision last month, made under pressure from Congress, to relax restrictions on logging of salvage timber on U.S. Forest Service lands. And he said that he had sought a quick resolution of court cases on logging old growth forests in Northern California, Oregon and Washington “so we can do what we can to preserve the forest but so we can get people logging again.”

Clinton chose to visit Billings on a two-day swing through the mountains because it is both a center of militia activity and it has organized a strong civic movement to oppose hate crimes.

But aides acknowledged that the trip also was inspired by the prospect of next year’s presidential election. “The main purpose is to tell people why Clinton should win the West,” said White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry.

Still, Billings’ status as a center for the Militia of Montana, one of the largest armed rightist networks in the nation, gave presidential aides some qualms. An extra-strong team of Secret Service agents flew in ahead of the President and enlisted local police and sheriffs to plan security for the visit.

Militia leaders said that they decided to stay out of Clinton’s way. “I’ve told everybody to get out of town,” said M. J. (Red) Beckman, Billings’s most prominent anti-government militant. In an interview, Beckman said he worried that federal government agents might assassinate Clinton during the visit “and blame it on the patriots.”

“What better place for the CIA, or whoever killed [President John F.] Kennedy, to do it again?” he asked.

Beckman said that he and other militia sympathizers believe forces within the federal government planted the Oklahoma City bomb “to make a scapegoat of the militias.”

“I have no time for this turkey Clinton anyway,” he said. “He’s going to be the first President ever to leave office and go directly to jail. Some of us think he and [Atty. Gen.] Janet Reno should be tried and hanged for the murders at Waco,” where some 80 members of the Branch Davidian religious community died in a fire as federal agents attacked their compound in 1993.