GOP Mounts Broad Attack on President’s Character

“Clinton’s an unusually good liar, unusually good.”

That quote, from a magazine interview last year with Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), one of President Clinton’s purported allies on Capitol Hill, leads off a new GOP fund-raising letter from Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour. “Bill Clinton is systematically sacrificing America’s future for your children and grandchildren in order to preserve his position in the polls,” the letter charges.

Condemning the nation’s chief executive for mendacity is more than a fund-raising gimmick for the Republicans. It is part of a broad assault on the president’s character, led by the party’s presumed nominee, Bob Dole, who is expected to make criticisms of Clinton a main feature of his trip to California over the next several days.

This week, with the Senate Whitewater Committee’s report blasting First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, the opening of a second Whitewater-related trial in Arkansas and the continued controversy over the White House’s improper gathering of FBI files during Clinton’s first year in office, the Republican assault on Clinton’s character will reach a new level of intensity.

But how much difference does it make? Political strategists differ widely.

Some analysts contend that character questions already have damaged Clinton badly. “He works incredibly hard at the job, he is bright, and pretty centrist, at least in his rhetoric, and he has great communications skills,” said Everett Carll Ladd, head of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. “But at the same time his numbers are mediocre. So I have to conclude that the character issue has held him down, though it hasn’t been enough to put him down.”

Indeed, at least one recent poll, by Time magazine and CNN, has shown a sharp tightening of the presidential race that CNN pollsters attributed in large part to concerns over Clinton’s character.

But other analysts point to differing polls, such as a new U.S. News & World Report survey released over the weekend and a survey taken earlier this year by the Los Angeles Times Poll, which indicate that character issues are less important to most voters than other factors.

Effort Faces Hurdles

Whichever polls are correct, Republican strategists concede that while they have high hopes for their character offensive, their effort faces formidable hurdles.

The GOP attack is double-barreled. In broadest terms Dole, in part by stressing the rigors he has overcome during his own life, is seeking to define the office of president as the setter of moral standards for the nation--a man whom Americans can hold up as an example for their children.

More practically, Dole and his surrogates are contending that because Clinton speaks with a forked tongue, he cannot be relied upon to fulfill his promises, which Republicans claim he lifted right out of their agenda in the first place.

Democrats argue, of course, that Americans have heard much of this before.

“Most [voters] have decided that whatever Clinton did, it probably wasn’t important and it was a long time ago,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.

Moreover, as Mellman also noted, Clinton is no longer an unknown figure to most Americans.

In the 1988 presidential campaign, Republican campaigners successfully used a series of issues to raise questions about the character and beliefs of the Democratic nominee, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts. But in that case, they were painting largely on a blank canvas--most Americans knew little about Dukakis and were receptive to new information.

By contrast, “people know Clinton now,” Mellman said. “They undoubtedly have some discomforts,” he conceded, but “those are vastly outweighed by what they’ve seen from him in office.”

Republicans may run the risk of giving the character issue a bad name--that is, using it so much that their tactics rob questions about honesty and trust of much of their meaning and provoke suspicion of their own motives and even, among some voters, sympathy for Clinton.

“I think they [Republicans] are trying very hard to malign the man and to hold the things over him that happened years ago, and I think they’re giving the man a raw deal,” said Ethelyn Slifko, an office manager from La Plata, Md., who was one of those surveyed in the Times Poll.

The more fundamental problem for the Republicans is the need to demonstrate to voters how and why Clinton’s personal behavior and mores affect his performance in office and therefore should influence their vote.

A senior advisor to Dole, Don Sipple, put the problem this way: “There is a lot of drip-drip-drip that there’s something wrong with him [Clinton]. . . . But it is hard to get a handle on it.

“Voters have to see a consequence for them before it becomes a relevant, salient issue.”

Staple for Jokes

There is no doubt that many Americans have questions about Clinton’s character, particularly his personal morality. Indeed, jokes on the subject have become a staple of popular culture, as, for example, a now well-known quip from TV talk-show host David Letterman in December that if Clinton continued to climb in the polls, “he’s going to start dating again.”

But character is a complex and multifaceted concept, covering far more than moral behavior, as Mellman pointed out. “Empathy is part of character,” Mellman contended. “People want a politician and a president who understands their problems. And on that aspect of character, Clinton overwhelms Bob Dole.” Indeed, recent polls have found Clinton consistently beating the former Kansas senator on questions such as which candidate better understands the problems facing average Americans.

Even during the 1992 campaign, when character was the mainstay of George Bush’s attempt to fend off Clinton’s challenge, voters’ assessment of the two men was mixed.

“Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, riches take flight and only character endures,” Bush liked to say on the stump, quoting Horace Greeley. But voters looked at character differently than Bush expected, according to a new study of the 1992 election by political scientists Ann Crigler of USC and Marion Just of Wellesley College.

In their study, based on interviewing voters in Los Angeles and three other U.S. cities and recently released as a book, “Crosstalk,” Crigler and Just discovered that 94% of those who had voted against Bush rated his character negatively. Among the factors that voters used to determine character, the research showed, were their impressions of a candidate’s integrity, empathy, personality and reliability.

Many voters gave Bush low marks on character in part because they blamed him for introducing negativism to the campaign by his attacks on Clinton, the research indicated. That impression was bolstered by recollections of Bush’s campaign attacks on Dukakis in 1988. In addition, Crigler said, voters found it difficult to give Bush much credit in the trust category after he reneged on the central promise of his 1988 campaign--not to raise taxes.

Despite the slow progress so far, Republicans have kept pounding away at the character theme.

They also cling to the hope that some particularly dramatic disclosure--perhaps something from the Whitewater investigation or a new personal indiscretion on Clinton’s part--will turn out to be the proverbial “smoking gun” that blasts the president’s reputation into smithereens. That is a thought that continues to cause Democratic strategists to lose sleep as well.

Dole Comparisons

The Republican thrust on Clinton is for the most part straight-faced and sober, heavily buttressed by comparison with Dole.

A 60-second Dole commercial, one of two being shown around the country on his behalf by the Republican National Committee, leans heavily on his upbringing in small-town Middle America, where “he learned the value of hard work, honesty and responsibility” and on his heroism in World War II combat. “Like many Americans, his life experience and values serve as a strong moral compass,” the narrator says.

Dole himself spelled out his version of the issue in a recent speech, declaring that the election is “a referendum on the basic values of the country. Americans look to the White House for moral leadership,” he declared, adding that the Clinton White House is “fundamentally adrift, without direction or moral vision.”

A second committee commercial brings the character offensive to bear directly on Clinton, using film clips to depict the president as taking six different positions on balancing the budget.

“Talk is cheap,” the announcer says. “Double-talk is expensive.”

The main point of the ad, of course, is not fiscal policy, but rather Clinton’s unreliability. Republicans hope to convince voters that Clinton “changes his stripes from day to day,” said Republican pollster and Dole advisor Fred Steeper. The aim is to reinforce the doubts that voters already have about Clinton’s trustworthiness.

“But it’s going to be a tough case to make,” Steeper said, “because people are liable to think that, in a way, all he’s doing is being a politician. We’ve got to make the case that it’s worse with Clinton.”