First Lady Focuses on Family

By JOHN M. BRODER and PAUL RICHTER

Aug. 28, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

CHICAGO —

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, portraying Democrats as the true guardians of family values, dominated the second night of the party’s national convention with a polished, policy-laden address laying out the social agenda of the second term her husband hopes to win.

Using homespun images in a smoothly crafted speech, Mrs. Clinton sought to address the nation as if gathered around a kitchen table. She aimed her remarks at the anxieties of the typical middle-class family--running through a detailed litany of education, health care, job loss and the safety and security of children.

Mrs. Clinton’s prime-time address--her first such appearance before a nation that has known her mostly through news clips and abbreviated television interviews--was the most extensive speech by a first lady at a national political convention in decades and sparked the first extended demonstration of this gathering--a three-minute ovation sprinkled with chants of “Hillary. Hillary. Hillary.”

Repeatedly referring to her daughter, Chelsea, now 16 and about to enter her senior year of high school, Mrs. Clinton directly answered Republican nominee Bob Dole’s mocking of her book on child-rearing, “It Takes a Village.”

“We have learned that to raise a happy, healthy and hopeful child, it takes a family, it takes teachers, it takes clergy, it takes business people, it takes community leaders, it takes those who protect our health and safety, it takes all of us,” she said.

“Yes, it takes a village,” she added. “And it takes a president. . . . It takes a president who not only holds these beliefs but acts on them. It takes Bill Clinton.”

Notably, however, Mrs. Clinton’s speech mentioned the opposition party only once--and that time favorably, when she noted that a Democrat and a Republican together had sponsored the health care reform law President Clinton signed earlier this month.

Similarly, the convention’s nominal keynote speaker, Gov. Evan Bayh of Indiana, who followed Mrs. Clinton, did not mention the word Republican even once--a sharp departure from the usual practice at political conventions of attacking the opposition, but a continuation of an image of being above the political fray that the Democrats have carefully honed here.

Some Stabs at Opposition

The night did include some sharp jabs at the opposition, from liberal stalwarts such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, former New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. But those all came before the prime-time hour televised on the nation’s broadcast networks.

All three, preferring victory over purity, endorsed President Clinton’s reelection even as they repeated their disagreement with his decision to eliminate the federal government’s welfare safety net for the nation’s poorest citizens.

Cuomo, for example, said that he believed that “the risk to children was too great to justify signing that bill--no matter what its political benefits.”

But Mrs. Clinton blew away whatever dissonant haze their criticisms might have introduced to the hall.

She was her usual earnest self, but absent was any hint of the strident absolutism that her critics ascribe to her.

Throughout her 20-minute talk, she presented herself as just another working mom, struggling with the same tensions and demands as the millions of families in suburbia that her husband is courting in his reelection bid.

“We all know that raising kids is a full-time job, and since most parents work, they are, we are, stretched thin,” she said. “Just think about what many parents are responsible for on any given day: packing lunches, dropping the kids off at school, going to work, checking to make sure that the kids get home from school safely, shopping for groceries, making dinner, doing the laundry, helping with homework, paying the bills.

“And I didn’t even mention taking the dog to the vet.”

To answer those stresses, Mrs. Clinton said, the president--”my husband” as she repeatedly called him--has proposed a variety of family-friendly initiatives, from increased “flex time” at work to cope with family crises to longer hospital stays for new mothers.

Mrs. Clinton did not attempt to match Elizabeth Hanford Dole’s floor-strolling talk at the Republican convention two weeks ago. She stayed fixed behind the bunting-draped podium to plead her husband’s case.

Hundreds of pre-printed signs reading “Welcome Home Hillary” were sprinkled through the hall. One homemade sign in the Illinois delegation read, “Anything Elizabeth Can Do Hillary Can Do Better.”

Her speech was rapturously received by most in the hall, faithful Democrats who have been appalled by what they consider the rough treatment Mrs. Clinton has received from Republicans and the media.

That treatment continued Tuesday as Republicans on Capitol Hill released a memo relating to the suicide of the late Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster.

The memo--part of several thousand pages of documents turned over to congressional committees by the White House--appeared to contradict some prior statements about Mrs. Clinton’s role in the handling of an apparent suicide note by Foster. The memo was based on a secondhand recollection of remarks by former White House chief of staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty, who disputed its accuracy.

Mary Leslie, a former deputy Los Angeles mayor and California delegate, said the first lady received such an emotional welcome because “we’re all a little sick of her being picked on.”

“They’ve Lived the Experience”

“We can defend her because she’s real,” Leslie added. “Give me a break: Liddy Dole’s never raised a kid. They [the Clintons] stayed married; they’re not divorced. They’ve lived the experience they are talking about.”

“She knocked it out of the ballpark,” said Lynn Cutler, delegate from Iowa and former party vice chairman.

“It was important for her to refer to her husband as her husband because she’s received so much bad press about her marriage,” observed Elizabeth Gettig, delegate from Pittsburgh, Pa. “She did that and it seemed to be curative. I give her a 10.”

But in her strong defense of the idea that “it takes a village” to raise children, Mrs. Clinton may have opened the door for Dole to resume his attacks. At the Republican convention, Dole had ridiculed that idea, charging that at its essence Mrs. Clinton’s philosophy argued for “the collective” to subordinate the responsibilities of parents.

Dole, by contrast, argues that government can best help parents by cutting taxes and thereby allowing them to keep more of their own money.

Just after the speech, White House officials arranged for one network, NBC, to film Mrs. Clinton standing in the holding area below the podium talking on a cellular telephone to her husband. “I love you, too, honey,” television watchers could hear her say.

Bill Clinton had watched his wife’s speech from Michigan where his train trip through the Midwest continued for its third day.

At a stop in Wyandotte, Mich., Clinton announced a $2.8-billion program to improve reading skills among schoolchildren. Later in the day, aides outlined a $3.4-billion program of aid to cities to soften the blow of the welfare reform bill the president signed last week. They also previewed a $1.9-billion environmental initiative that Clinton will announce today to speed the cleanup of polluted industrial sites.

Aides said Clinton proposed to pay for the new programs by moving roughly $1 billion from his AmeriCorps national service program to the new literacy program and by ending a series of tax breaks given to businesses.

While Mrs. Clinton dominated the evening, the earlier part of the convention session resembled a rally of the vanquished.

One by one, liberal champions of the party’s past stepped forward to praise Clinton, a man who has wrested the party away from much that its liberal wing holds sacred--most recently with his decision on the welfare bill.

Just 16 years ago, another incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, lost his bid for reelection in part because leaders of the liberal wing of the party were unable to enthusiastically support him as he defended his office against Republican challenger Ronald Reagan. Unlike Clinton, Carter had to contend with serious intraparty bickering and a serious primary challenge mounted on the left by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

By embracing Clinton on Tuesday night, Cuomo, Jackson and other party liberals demonstrated they had learned a lesson from that bitter defeat in 1980. It also showed how effectively the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress has forced Democrats to bury their minor ideological differences in the face of a powerful conservative Republican movement led by Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

Impassioned Liberal Appeals

Both Jackson and Cuomo delivered impassioned appeals on behalf of traditional liberal principles. But they swallowed their dismay with Clinton’s signing of the welfare bill to urge his reelection as the best way to stop what Cuomo called “the radical right and the rabid revolutionaries” led by Gingrich.

Neither man masked his distaste for the Republican-backed welfare law signed by Clinton last week. Jackson, recalling the riot-marred Democratic convention of 1968, said that then, “the tension within our party was over warfare. In 1996, it’s welfare. Last week, over the objections of many Democratic Party leaders, and the opposition of millions of Americans, Franklin Roosevelt’s six-decade guarantee of support for women and children was abandoned. On this issue, many of us differ with the president.”

“President Clinton has been our first line of defense against the Newt Gingrich contract [with America]; America’s right-wing assault on elderly, our students and our civil rights,” he said.

While those assaults on the GOP punctuated the early convention session, in prime-time, the party put forward an Ozzie and Harriet script written weeks ago.

Mrs. Clinton was introduced by Tipper Gore, the wife of Vice President Al Gore, who stressed two of her favored concerns--stemming the flood of sexual and violent images in popular entertainment and broadening health care plans to include treatment for mental illnesses.

And she pleaded for more civility in the national political debate. “I really believe, as I know you believe, that it is our responsibility to America’s voters to eliminate viciousness from our political discourse, to choose language that unites rather than divides, to disagree with decency and dignity, and to keep our sense of humor,” she said.

Mrs. Gore introduced Hillary Clinton as “a woman who always maintains her grace, dignity and humor even while being subjected to unimaginable incivility.”

The first lady was followed by Bayh, the young conservative Democratic governor of Indiana, whose speech was memorable chiefly for the appearance on the podium of his wife and his 9-month-old twin sons--an obvious tit-for-tat to Republican keynoter Rep. Susan Molinari of New York, whose infant daughter appeared at the GOP convention via satellite.

Bayh used his moment in the national spotlight to extol the president’s efforts to protect social programs and preserve the values of the heartland that bore him.

At the opening of the session, delegates approved the 1996 Democratic platform--a bland document that, for the first time since Harry S. Truman was president omits a call for “universal” health coverage--the rock on which Clinton’s first two years in office foundered.

In the early hours of the session, party officials allocated brief speaking times to a stew of speakers covering an assortment of themes. Among those chosen were Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, Mark Klaas, father of murdered Petaluma schoolgirl Polly Klaas and businessman Justin Dart Jr., a Republican and the son of one of the Southern California businessmen in former President Reagan’s informal “Kitchen Cabinet.”

As for Clinton, he continued his tour of the Midwest, coming briefly under fire for his free trade policies as he spoke at a Toledo auto plant but otherwise concentrating on his theme for the day--literacy.

The trade issue arose before several thousand auto workers at the Chrysler Jeep plant in Toledo, as Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) complained about the battering that textiles, auto parts and other industries have taken because of the foreign competitors aided by U.S. trade policies.

Clinton, who rode the Toledo factory’s 2 millionth Cherokee after it came off the assembly line, did not reply directly to Kaptur’s challenge. But he contended that his administration had pursued a “fair trade” policy that stood up for U.S. workers and pointed out that the plant’s exports had risen from 17,500 Jeeps four years ago to 41,500 this year.

“When I became president, I decided we didn’t have the option to walk away from the trading world,” he said.

Clinton concluded his day in East Lansing, Mich., where he addressed about 15,000 people who filled a field at Michigan State University at about midnight. He urged voters again and again to hand him a second term.

“It’s your future . . . that’s at stake and I want you to help me pay for it,” Clinton said. “Will you help me?”

Times staff writers Jack Nelson, Ronald Brownstein, Sara Fritz and Sam Fulwood III contributed to this story.