Democrats Convene in Unity

The once-fractious Democratic Party opened its national convention in unaccustomed unity Monday with calls for new federal measures against crime, including a proposal from President Clinton to bar spouse abusers from owning handguns.

In a buoyant mood sustained by Clinton’s convention-week improvements in public opinion polls, thousands of delegates and guests danced, sang and cheered their way through an evening of speeches from party leaders and a carefully picked cast of “ordinary people” headed by wheelchair-bound actor Christopher Reeve.

Party leaders and delegates said they have put aside once-bitter arguments over welfare reform and other issues to make sure Clinton and Vice President Al Gore reap a handsome public opinion “bounce” from the week’s festivities, a made-for-television spectacle designed to showcase the administration’s favorite issues.

If they succeed, Clinton will be the first Democratic president to win two elections since Franklin D. Roosevelt--and Democratic candidates for Congress might even regain control of the House and Senate, lost to conservative Republicans only two years ago.

Monday’s convention themes were the fight against crime, an issue Clinton has long embraced as a way to blunt Republican attacks, and gun control, a “wedge issue” that clearly separates the two parties.

The president, wending his way slowly toward Chicago across the vote-rich Midwest aboard a special campaign train, stopped at a police academy in Columbus, Ohio, to propose a new law that would extend federal handgun control to people convicted of misdemeanor spousal abuse, a category that could include tens of thousands of people.

Although Clinton and his entourage are not scheduled to arrive in Chicago until Wednesday, the president’s speech was timed to magnify the impact of one of the convention’s main events Monday: an appearance by gun-control crusader Sarah Brady and her husband, James, who was grievously wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan, and after whom the existing federal handgun control law, the Brady bill, is named.

“Those who threaten the safety of others do not deserve our trust,” Clinton said. “. . . if you’re stalking or harassing women or children, you shouldn’t have a gun. And if you commit an act of violence against your spouse or your child, you shouldn’t have a gun.”

Clinton said the change is needed because prosecutors often accept plea bargains that reduce domestic crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

The handgun proposal represented an effort by Clinton to defend his crime-fighting record against Republican attacks. In recent days, GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole has painted Clinton as soft on crime and half-hearted in combating drug abuse.

Clinton aides say gun control is one of their favorite “wedge issues.” Polls show that a large majority of independent suburban voters, a key battleground constituency in presidential elections, favors more control on handguns.

Reacting to the president’s proposal, officials of the Dole campaign emphasized that their candidate has already proposed an “instant check initiative” that would prevent anyone under a court order for stalking or harassing a spouse from purchasing any gun.

“Bob Dole believes all guns--not just handguns--should be kept out of the hands of domestic abusers,” said a Dole spokeswoman, Christina Martin. “Dealing with America’s epidemic of domestic violence will take tough laws and tough prosecutors, not just more empty rhetoric.” Critics of the instant check proposal argue that technology to make it work does not exist--in part because not all states maintain computer-searchable records of convictions for crimes such as domestic violence.

It is uncertain how many people would be denied guns under the president’s proposal, which would require enactment by Congress, but the number would almost certainly reach into the tens of thousands. The FBI estimates that 1.7 million incidents of domestic violence occurred in 1995, including 88,500 that involved firearms.

Monday’s convention session relegated most old-fashioned political speechifying to the hours before the nation’s major television networks began their single hour of prime-time coverage.

By careful design, the televised hour focused on the Bradys; on Reeve, the actor who played Superman on film but was left paralyzed after he was thrown from a horse in 1995, and has become a leading advocate of improved health insurance coverage; and on people who have displayed courage and determination, like Chicago police officer Mike Robbins and Ohio autoworker Todd Clancy.

The party’s general chairman, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, said the lineup was aimed partly at drawing a television audience. “It has star quality, if you will,” he said.

Each day during the convention, aides said, Clinton plans to focus on a different issue by issuing a new proposal from his train--and the campaign’s principal speakers will echo his theme in Chicago.

Today, as he steams through Michigan, Clinton will propose a new federal initiative aimed at making sure children learn to read, officials said.

The proposal, which in one version was dubbed the “Reading Corps,” would dispatch trained reading specialists and national service volunteers to “make sure every kid can read by the third grade,” as one White House aide put it. Like many of Clinton’s recent initiatives, the plan would attempt to leverage relatively modest federal spending by encouraging local action.

Administration officials estimate the program would cost $1.6 billion in new spending over five years, with another $1 billion from anticipated spending on the national service program known as Americorps.

Other proposals Clinton plans to unveil include an environmental initiative, scheduled for Wednesday, and a new tax credit to encourage the hiring of welfare recipients, scheduled for Thursday. The total projected cost of the new plans is $8.3 billion, and administration officials said Clinton will propose cuts in other programs to offset the new spending.

The proposed tax credit for job creation is aimed partly at mollifying liberal Democrats who were bitterly opposed to Clinton’s decision last month to sign a Republican-sponsored welfare reform bill, officials said.

Administration officials said the welfare proposal may include both an expansion of an existing tax credit for employers who hire welfare recipients and a $3-billion program to help states create public-sector jobs or subsidize private-sector salaries for welfare recipients.

But some officials who opposed the president’s decision to sign the welfare bill said the proposals are too insignificant to mitigate the effects of the new law.

“These are just sops to the left,” said one unhappy official. “It’s just putting balm on a wound.”

They also expressed doubt that even a limited program could receive congressional approval unless Democrats win back control of the House and Senate. “It doesn’t have a prayer of making it through Congress,” one official said.

Dodd, who had denounced Clinton’s decision to sign the welfare bill, said many delegates disagreed with the president’s decision, but he predicted that the issue will not weaken party unity here.

Nevertheless, liberal officials and delegates frequently raised the issue Monday.

Clinton has said he plans to seek “corrections” in the bill if he is elected to a second term. On Monday, Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.) told an audience that Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala already has a secret draft of legislation to change the welfare law, but an HHS spokeswoman denied that.

Monday was also a day for caucuses and pep talks among the delegates.

“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and organize,” Vice President Al Gore told New York delegates in the morning.

Once inside the United Center, a basketball arena used by the NBA champion Chicago Bulls, delegates danced the Macarena--the arm-waving, hip-wagging Latin step that invaded the nation’s baseball parks this summer--and chanted “Four More Years.”

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton visited several delegations and told them why she believes her husband should be reelected: “It’s been a good four years for the people of this country.”

Mrs. Clinton, who has been a major target of a Republican-led Senate committee investigating the Whitewater real estate deal in Arkansas, spent much of the day soaking up partisan comfort from her fellow Democrats. She received long, standing ovations at several stops.

Alluding to Dole’s attacks on the administration for the rise in drug use among young Americans, Mrs. Clinton told a meeting of governors: “We must do more. Our children apparently have forgotten the message we need to be telling them, that drugs not only kill, they stunt lives, they destroy motivation.”

In an indirect response to Dole’s criticism of her book, “It Takes a Village,” Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that a child’s most important role models “are the parents.”

But she added that “every single family I know is influenced by what goes on outside their doors. We have to do a better job of helping out our families. That’s what the president is trying to do, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”

Times staff writers Stephen Braun, Ronald Brownstein, Sam Fulwood III and Judy Pasternak in Chicago; Paul Richter aboard the Clinton campaign train; and Elizabeth Shogren in Washington contributed to this story.