Dole’s Ex-Rivals Sing His Praises, Bash Clinton

Finding new unity in their shared distaste for President Clinton, Republicans on Tuesday evening gleefully attacked the Democrat’s record on everything from taxes to crime to welfare reform, and promised that a Bob Dole presidency would “restore the American dream.”

“Bill Clinton . . . promises one thing and does another,” said Rep. Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.), the keynote speaker on the second day of the Republican National Convention. “He hopes we will forget his broken promises. But . . . Americans know that Bill Clinton’s promises have the life span of a Big Mac on Air Force One.”

As delegates cheered enthusiastically, speaker after speaker returned to the same charges: that Clinton promised in 1992 to balance the federal budget, cut middle-class taxes and enact welfare reform, only to retreat from those commitments once he was in office.

“Candidate Clinton promised a balanced budget; Congress passed it; President Clinton vetoed it,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. ‘It’s time to elect a president who will keep Bill Clinton’s promises--and that man is Bob Dole.”

She then summoned up a videotape compiled by the Republican National Committee that showed Clinton, during his first term, pledging to seek a balanced budget by a series of shifting target dates--five years, then seven, nine, ten, eight, and finally “between seven and nine’--leaving delegates laughing. The party used the footage in a recent national advertisement for the GOP cause.

The fusillade of attacks on Clinton reflected a theme Dole and other Republicans plan to rely on in the coming campaign: voters’ persistent doubts, reflected in national polls, about the president’s consistency and reliability.

“Have you forgotten that Bill Clinton promised a middle-class tax cut and then passed the largest tax increase in American history?” Molinari asked.

“No!” the delegates roared.

The White House and the Clinton campaign responded immediately with a 15-page rebuttal--and managed to smuggle copies onto the podium inside the San Diego Convention Center even as Molinari was attacking the president.

The response noted that Molinari was referring to Clinton’s 1993 tax increase, which raised taxes on higher-income families--but which economists point out was smaller, when corrected for inflation, than a tax increase Dole supported in 1982.

The Democratic paper did not address Clinton’s likely failure to balance the federal budget by his original five-year target, but argued that his most recent fiscal plan would balance it in seven years.

Other speakers took aim at Clinton’s record on welfare reform, crime and education.

Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, a doctor before he became a politician, accused Clinton of “playing politics with Medicare” by refusing to support GOP proposals to change the old-age health care system.

“Bob Dole is committed to dealing openly with the crisis and cleaning up waste and fraud,” he said, without indicating whether Dole would take the politically risky step of proposing a large-scale restructuring of Medicare.

Gov. Tommy G. Thompson of Wisconsin, a GOP leader on welfare reform, charged that Clinton agreed last month to sign a Republican-sponsored welfare bill “only when the pollsters spoke.”

“Bill Clinton said he would end welfare as we know it,” Thompson said. ‘But it took Bob Dole and the Republican Congress to do it.”

And they returned to their favorite theme: the argument that Clinton cannot be trusted.

In a litany that brought delegates to their feet, Hutchison, with a broad smile and a Texas drawl, declared: “America! It’s time to wake up to President Clinton--and his high-taxing, free-spending, promise-breaking, social-security-taxing, health-care-socializing, drug-coddling, power-grabbing, business-busting, lawsuit-loving, U.N.-following, FBI-abusing, IRS-increasing, $200-haircutting’--she paused for laughs and cheers--’gas-taxing, over-regulating, bureaucracy-trusting, class-baiting, privacy-violating, values-crushing, truth-dodging, Medicare-forsaking, property-rights-taking, job-destroying friends!”

And in a swipe at First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and her book “It Takes a Village,” Hutchison said: “In the real world, we don’t want a village to raise a child; we want a family.”

David Eichenbaum, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, charged that Hutchison’s speech showed that Republican leaders “have no positive message on which to run, leaving [former] Sen. Dole and his surrogates nothing left but to engage in nasty, gratuitous, personal attacks on the president of the United States.”

In any case, many television viewers never heard it--because at least one major network cut away from Hutchison to its own commentators.

This was the night for Dole’s surrogates to savage Clinton, and the 1,756 delegates and the spectators in the hall thoroughly enjoyed it--although there was little oratory for the ages.

Molinari delivered her address in a chatty, conversational tone, with few rhetorical flourishes.

“This November, we will elect the last president of this century and the first of the new millennium,” she said. “We can restore the American dream . . . We must choose the better man for a better America.”

The 38-year-old congresswoman from Staten Island acknowledged that she was chosen as keynote speaker in part to try to improve the GOP’s standing with a voting group that now swings heavily for Democrats: younger women.

“I was trying to get a message out not only for women, but for my generation,” she told reporters after the speech.

Molinari deliberately steered clear of the issue that has divided the GOP most deeply: abortion. She has been one of the party’s most dogged proponents of abortion rights, and said this week that she plans to ignore the GOP platform’s antiabortion clause.

“Only the media thought I was going to address the pro-choice issue,” she said.

Her decision helped preserve the growing sense of party unity in the hall. On Tuesday morning, antiabortion delegates discussed staging a walkout during Molinari’s speech because of her position.

But insurgent conservative Patrick J. Buchanan, Dole’s main rival for the nomination, appealed to the delegates to stay in the hall and instead to wave their white cowboy-style hats as a silent protest. The white hats bore a ribbon with the words “RNC for Life--the Life of the Party.” During her speech, some delegates followed Buchanan’s advice, some kept their hats on, but none were seen walking out.

“We have profound disagreements with Ms. Molinari over right to life,” Buchanan said after addressing antiabortion activists at Sea World before the Tuesday evening session. “I think she’s wrong on the issue. But we want to basically give our party the best possible chance to win in November, and I think that sitting and listening to her, even though we disagree with her, will advance our cause.”

Buchanan visited the convention floor Tuesday afternoon but said he plans to stay away during Dole’s formal nomination tonight and his acceptance speech on Thursday.

“It’s a madhouse,” he explained.

In a break with tradition, Buchanan and other candidates who challenged Dole for the nomination were not given chances to speak live to the convention. Instead, the losing candidates were limited to brief appearances on a video screen rather than in person--which helped avert the possibility that Buchanan or any other rival might steal the spotlight from the plain-spoken Dole.

Buchanan, who won 21% of the Republican vote during this year’s primary elections, did not appear at all. Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander appeared in an 80-second video clip excoriating Clinton for opposing GOP proposals for more choice in public education; Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) appeared in a 25-second video talking about lower taxes and economic growth.

Still, some conservatives were dissatisfied with the arrangements. “I would have invited everyone to speak, but the Dole people are running it,” complained Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the conservative Eagle Forum. “They want to show us videos.”

And some conservatives were vocally unhappy with the predominance on the podium of relative moderates like Molinari.

“I’m very disappointed. I don’t think she represents the Republican grass-roots woman. They put her on to appeal to the strident woman vote. But this is the image that the hierarchy of the party wants to project,” complained Karen Johnson, 55, a delegate from Arizona.

But the visibility of moderates like Molinari and retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, the featured speaker on Monday night, reinforced party leaders’ overall message: that this year’s convention is “not Houston,” the divisive 1992 meeting that spotlighted the ascendancy of social conservatives and their disagreements with then-President Bush.

The overall effect, jubilant convention organizers said, is that voters watching the convention on television are seeing a unified, tolerant party--not a narrow, exclusive ideological club.

And some conservatives embraced the vision of a “big-tent” party.

The Rev. Lou Sheldon, an Orange County conservative pastor and chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, said he was upbeat because of Dole’s choice of Jack Kemp as vice presidential nominee. “With Dole selecting Kemp, it has resonated with the base. It has energized us,” Sheldon said.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a conservative favorite, returned to the “big tent” theme sounded on Monday by Powell: that the GOP must reach out to minorities and the poor, and demonstrate that its policies are compassionate.

“True compassion is measured by our own good works, not by how many tax dollars we spend to support a failed federal bureaucracy,” he said, extolling private charities.

The House speaker also declared the GOP firmly in favor of beach volleyball, the California-invented sport that was included at the Olympic Games in Atlanta last month.

Hailing Olympic gold medalist Kent Steffes, who joined him on the podium, Gingrich declared that beach volleyball was a product of American freedom--because “no bureaucrat would have invented it.”

Most television viewers missed that moment, though--convention planners, aware that Gingrich scores in opinion polls as one of the nation’s least popular political figures, put the House speaker on stage a full half an hour before major networks began their coverage.

In any case, the networks--which this year reduced their convention programming to a single hour of prime time--showed relatively little of the speakers even then.

Dole was not at the convention center on Tuesday. He had breakfast with the New York delegation, visited a group of disabled citizens and had lunch with Molinari and Gingrich.

Dole aides said the former Kansas senator will be formally nominated this evening with a speech by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), followed by seconding speeches by Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Texas) and Wendy Lee Gramm, the wife of Sen. Gramm and a former Reagan administration official. The lineup will provide a deliberate image of ethnic diversity: Bonilla is Latino, Gramm is Asian American.

Vice presidential nominee Kemp cast himself as a bicoastal candidate, with a spirited homecoming session with the New York delegation followed by an economic round-table in which he played up his California roots.

“We drove by Jack Murphy Stadium, and my heart started to pound,” the former San Diego Chargers quarterback told a group of San Diegans.

Times staff writers Janet Hook, Dave Lesher, Dan Morain and Elizabeth Shogren also contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GOP Comes Out Swinging

Republicans carefully scripted Day Two of their convention as the night to lay out their case against President Clinton. Speakers attacked Clinton’s record on welfare, taxes, the war on drugs and other issues.

Rep. Susan Molinari: “This speech is a lot like a Bill Clinton promise. It won’t last long --and it will sound like a Republican speaking.”

****

THOMAS J. RIDGE, Pennsylvania governor: “Bill Clinton? He talks tough on drugs. But drug use among children is up. Drug prosecutions are down. . . . There is nothing more tragic--nor more tragically ignored by Bill Clinton--than society living in fear of its children.”

****

TOMMY G. THOMPSON, Wisconsin governor: “The welfare system as Bill Clinton liked it was America’s Berlin Wall--dividing the less fortunate from the rest of society and creating a permanent underclass. It relegated the poor to our inner cities. . . . “

****

JIM EDGAR, Illinois governor: “Bill Clinton’s government has created the wrong climate for small businesses--high taxes, oppressive regulations, intrusive government that stifles growth. Bill Clinton pushed through the largest tax increase in history.”

STATE OF THE NATION

What’s gone up and what’s gone down in the Clinton years? A look at key indicators.

(Please see newspaper for following charts:)

PER CAPITA DISPOSABLE INCOME

FEDERAL TAXES AS A PERCENTAGE OF GDP

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

NEW BUSINESS FORMATIONS

CRIME RATE

VIOLENT CRIME

AVERAGE HOURLY EARNINGS

U.S. GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT

U.S. BUDGET DEFICIT

ACCUMULATED FEDERAL DEBT

GDP GROWTH

U.S. TRADE BALANCE

U.S. EXPORTS

U.S. CONSUMER PRICE INDEX

SAT AVERAGES

HIGH SCHOOL DRUG USE

*

Source: Departments of Treasury, Labor, Commerce and Office of Management and Budget, Dun & Bradstreet, FBI, Tax Foundation, Datastream, College Board, Digest of Education Statistics.

Researched by ROB CIOE, MALOY MOORE and CARY SCHNEIDER