Clinton, Dole Use Holiday to Hit the Road

President Clinton and GOP rival Bob Dole made dueling Independence Day appearances Thursday as America celebrated its 220th birthday and entered the final four months of the election campaign.

The president went to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in southern Maryland to boast about progress on the environment under his administration. Then he traveled to Youngstown, Ohio, where he talked of the importance of education and joked with the crowd about the movie “Independence Day,” with its scene of extraterrestrials blowing up the White House.

Dole, returning from a brief swing through California, stopped in heavily Republican suburbs outside Chicago, taking part in Fourth of July parades and talking of patriotism.

At Patuxent, with a photogenic backdrop of trees, clear blue sky and a creek, Clinton witnessed the release into the wild of a young female bald eagle that had been wounded in the shoulder in April and was nursed back to health at the Baltimore Zoo.

The release of the bird served as an opportunity for Clinton to praise the success of the Endangered Species Act in bringing the national symbol back from the edge of extinction.

On the nation’s first Independence Day, as many as a quarter of a million bald eagles soared over the continental United States, but 25 years ago, only about 400 pairs were left, Clinton told the crowd. Today, there are more than 4,500 pairs of bald eagles in the Lower 48 states, he said.

“We must not do anything that would weaken our health and safety and environmental laws,” he said. “The freedom to breathe clean air, drink safe water, pass a safe world to our children, to share our environment with God’s other creatures, these are liberties we dare not take for granted and we dare not turn our back on.”

Clinton did not name those who might want to “turn our back” on the environment, but aides distributed literature to reporters asserting that “all of the laws that have brought the bald eagle back . . . are under attack by Republican leaders.”

Congressional Republican leaders have made a number of proposals for scaling back the Endangered Species Act but have now largely backed off the effort in the face of considerable public opposition.

In Youngstown, where generally friendly crowds greeted him, Clinton boasted of aid his administration has sent to the once-depressed industrial areas of Ohio, a state that is a crucial election battleground.

He also joked about the movie. “I don’t know if any of you have seen this new movie, ‘Independence Day,’ ” he said, noting that in the film space aliens destroy the White House on July 4.

“I hope it’s there when I get back,” he added, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Dole was accompanied by an array of Republican state and local officials as he strolled briskly for nearly an hour in a festive parade through Wheaton, Ill. He frequently zigzagged from one sidewalk to the other, greeting citizens and posing for photographs. Lined three and four deep in many places, most of the parade viewers cheered when Dole passed.

Afterward, Dole went by motorcade to a nearby park, where he delivered a patriotic address.

His remarks were largely devoid of partisan politics, although near the end he three times urged the crowd of several hundred people to “vote for Bob Dole.”

And in what might be interpreted as a subtle reminder of Clinton’s failure to serve in the military, Dole recalled the sacrifices of America’s fighting men and women and said, “We’ve never been afraid to pay that price.”

Repeating his now-standard warning that the world “remains a very dangerous place,” Dole condemned terrorism--something Clinton had also done in his remarks.

Those guilty of the recent bomb attack on American soldiers in Saudi Arabia must be caught, “and the punishment ought to be death,” Dole said.

Despite the general nature of his remarks, Dole used a TelePrompTer--a sign, perhaps, that he intends to get back “on message” and not repeat the sort of ad-libbed statements on controversial topics that have sidetracked his campaign in recent weeks.

At both the parade and his park appearance, the former senator from Kansas was dogged by reminders of two such festering controversies.

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A Democrat-sponsored “Buttman,” dressed as a giant cigarette, followed Dole from the parade to the park--a partisan ploy to remind voters of Dole’s past expressions of doubt about the addictive nature of tobacco. Another sign along the way read: “Protect Children, Not Tobacco.” Also dogging Dole was a Joe Camel character wearing a lab coat labeled: “Dole’s Surgeon General?”

Elsewhere, placard-bearing abortion opponents dotted the fringes of both Dole appearances. Antiabortion activists have been angry over what they see as attempts by Dole to weaken the GOP’s platform plank on the issue.

Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), Dole’s handpicked chairman of the party’s platform committee, accompanied the candidate at the parade and told reporters that the controversy over the abortion plank is “practically resolved, and it will be resolved.”

But in what may foreshadow a key tactical change, Hyde said pointedly that “there will be an expression of diversity” in the platform rather than a “declaration of tolerance”--the phrase that Dole has repeatedly used to describe the language he would like to insert into the platform. He also indicated that he was not yet prepared to accept Dole’s position of putting the softening language into the abortion plank.

“It will be in the document. It could be anywhere. We want to keep the element of surprise alive,” Hyde said.

Chen reported from Wheaton and Randolph from Youngstown.