Drop Whitewater as Issue, Alexander Says : Politics: People ‘don’t give a hoot’ about that or the Gingrich ethics probe, GOP candidate says. ‘More important things’ should be debated in ’96.

Republican presidential hopeful Lamar Alexander, describing Washington as “obsessed with investigations,” declared Friday that the Whitewater investigation of President Clinton and the ethics probe of House Speaker Newt Gingrich should not be issues in next year’s election campaign.

The former Tennessee governor, one of the leading candidates for the GOP nomination, said there “are more important things” voters want to know about than these investigations. But he stopped short of calling for ending any of the probes.

Four congressional committees and independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr have been looking into Whitewater and a House committee has been conducting an ethics investigation into Gingrich’s conduct.

Starr’s investigation has continued for more than a year, at a cost so far of more than $25 million. There has been no indication he is close to wrapping up the case. In fact, he recently extended it to include examination of $7,000 in donations two Arkansas bankers made to Clinton’s 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial campaign.

Alexander, interviewed at a Times Washington Bureau luncheon, said: “I’m sick and tired of independent counsels, and I think most people in the country are. I think if you spent a lot less time in Washington investigating each other and a lot more time worrying about the kind of country we’re going to have, we’d be better off.”

He said he had been throughout the country and attended 50 Republican meetings in Florida during the past six weeks. No one asked him about Whitewater or the Gingrich ethics probe. “I don’t think people give a hoot about that,” Alexander said.

Speaking forcefully during much of the 80-minute interview, Alexander also accused the leading GOP candidate, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, and his closest rival, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, of “mean-spiritedness” for calling for an end to government benefits for legal immigrants.

Clinton “is just licking his chops at the possibility of running against one of our Washington senators, because we’re coming across as mean-spirited too often,” Alexander said.

For example, he said, welfare legislation that excludes legal and illegal immigrants from benefits “is a play for votes. It’s a mean-spirited thing.”

He also said Republicans were wrong to talk about ending racial preferences in awarding government contracts without also discussing the social ill those preferences were meant to address: discrimination. “I think when you talk about racial preference, which I condemn, without condemning racial discrimination, I think that sends a mean-spirited message.”

Alexander, a former university president who served as a Richard Nixon White House aide and as education secretary in the George Bush Administration, stressed that he strongly backs most of the Republican “contract with America,” but believes it doesn’t go far enough in proposals to turn over federal programs to state governments.

Despite his Washington service, Alexander stressed his credentials as an “outsider,” especially when compared to Dole and Gramm, and he ridiculed the welfare reform bill they support as “800 pages from Washington telling us what welfare is, what the benefits ought to be, how long that can be.” Local and state officials, he said, “are not too stupid to decide that for ourselves.”

Alexander said he would end Washington’s participation in welfare--”all of Aid to Families With Dependent Children; all of food stamps; and all of the Women, Infants and Children’s programs.” That would mean about $55 billion less revenue the federal government would need, transferring “all of the responsibility back to us in the states,” he added.

Many states are led by Republican governors who have pledged not to raise taxes. Asked whether those governors would now be willing to abandon those pledges to meet their new welfare burden, he said, “that would be up to them.”

Alexander went on to assail what he called a “terrible attitude in Washington” that state and local officials won’t make the right decisions. “This whole place ought to be cleaned out six months a year and sent home.”

He also criticized federal gun control laws as unworkable, including the ban on assault weapons, and called for forming state-operated chain gangs to punish those who commit crimes with guns.

Alexander acknowledged that some studies have shown that the gun control law passed by Congress last year has been effective, but said other studies disagree. He said he opposes the law.

The way to stop people from using guns, Alexander said, is to “go on television for three months and announce that if they use a weapon in the commission of a crime, they’ll be in a chain gang for six days a week, 12 hours a day, and they can have something to look forward to.”

The old practice of using chain gangs to work alongside highways was abandoned in the 1930s after being widely criticized as inhumane. But several Southern states recently revived the practice as an answer to rising crime rates.

Although Tennessee prisons do not use chain gangs, Alexander said: “If I were the governor of Tennessee today, I would go on television for three months, and I would advertise that this will happen, and then I would do it.”