Democrats Pledge a Positive Campaign as Clinton Arrives

President Clinton, his confidence cresting at the conclusion of a four-day, Midwestern whistle-stop tour, arrived here Wednesday night as delegates to the Democratic National Convention prepared to renominate him for what they hope will be the first two-term Democratic presidency in 60 years.

As the president’s helicopter touched down, bringing to a close the final leg of his journey, Democratic Party delegates were already assembled at the nearby convention center, ready to formally select Clinton and Vice President Al Gore to be their standard-bearers in the November election.

In keeping with one of their major themes for the week--an attempt to portray Clinton as an “above the battle” statesman rather than a partisan leader--Democrats repeatedly pledged during the day’s speeches that the Clinton-Gore team would mount a positive, well-intentioned campaign in the fall, rejecting the negativism that has caused so many American voters to become cynical or uninterested in politics.

Formally placing Clinton’s name into nomination, the party chairman, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, took the highly unusual step of praising the nominee of the opposition party, his former Senate colleague, Bob Dole, complimenting him on his service and sacrifice for the country and calling him a “fine person,” albeit one with “flawed ideas.”

“It is not Bob Dole’s reputation that I question,” he said in his prepared text. “It is his agenda for America. Sometimes a fine person has flawed ideas. This is such a time.”

The compliments were not, of course, purely altruistic. Democrats know that voters strongly dislike negative campaigns. But they also know that given Clinton’s large lead in current polls, Republicans have little hope of winning unless they find a way to reduce the president’s currently favorable image sharply.

By portraying themselves as the party with a “positive message,” Democratic strategists may be able to put Republicans in the difficult position of either playing the politically unpopular role of the negative campaigner or of forgoing their most potent weapons--attacks on Clinton’s character.

As for Gore, his speech was designed to lay out the accomplishments of the administration over the last four years. And he planned to draw a sharp contrast between Clinton, who just turned 50, and his 73-year-old opponent.

“Make no mistake: There is a profound difference in outlook between the president and the man who seeks his office,” Gore said in his prepared text. “In his speech from San Diego, Sen. Dole offered himself as a bridge to the past. Tonight, Bill Clinton and I offer ourselves as a bridge to the future.”

It was a genuinely triumphant arrival for Clinton, whose campaign has been reveling in good polling numbers, favorable convention reviews and the large crowds that came out to greet him as his “21st Century Express” train slowly snaked toward Chicago through West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and Indiana.

“Remember,” Clinton told his audience at his final stop in Michigan City, Ind., “70 more days to four more years!”

Setting the Tone

Inside the convention hall, meanwhile, Dodd was expected to use his speech to set a respectful tone for the president’s upcoming reelection campaign.

Drawing a contrast with the more partisan speeches at the Republican convention in San Diego earlier this month, Dodd, in his prepared text, called on all Democrats to make an effort to bring civility back into the national political discourse.

“On this August evening,” Dodd said, “in this hall, I ask each and every one of you to pledge with me that this campaign will be worthy of the people we seek to lead and of the land we love. Let us do our part to restore civility to America’s political discourse. . . . The American people are fed up with relentless assaults on people’s reputations.

“This has to stop--and stop now.”

And Dodd called on the Republicans to do the same.

“Stop attacking the president’s family,” he said. “Stick to the issues. We may at times oppose one another, but we must always respect each other.”

In essence, Dodd was calling on the Republicans to stop attacking Clinton where he is vulnerable--on issues related to character, the Whitewater scandal and the alleged misdeeds of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dodd drew a sharp distinction between Clinton and Dole on key issues that came across the president’s desk over the last four years.

He noted that Clinton supported the Family Leave Act, increasing the minimum wage to $5.15 an hour and a woman’s right to have an abortion, while Dole opposed each of those items. He added that Clinton opposed abolishing the Education Department and other key programs, while Dole advocated them.

Gore Gets Edge

Gore, as the vice presidential nominee, normally would speak on the same night as the presidential contender. In that position, the vice presidential speech is always overshadowed. By scheduling Gore’s speech on Wednesday night, convention planners appeared to be giving him a small advantage in the yet-unjoined race for the Democratic presidential nomination in the year 2000.

According to aides, Gore was planning to embellish his speech with personal anecdotes as well as inside stories demonstrating Clinton’s strength as president and drawing a strong contrast between the president and his opponent. The speech was expected to focus on improvements in the economy over the last four years and how they have affected Americans.

Dodd’s call for Democrats to disavow negative campaigning in the fall was echoed in many of the speeches of Democratic candidates for Congress, including a number from California, who spoke to the convention earlier in the day.

“Make no mistake,” said Peter Navarro, a Democratic congressional challenger running in San Diego, “there are big differences between Democrats and our opponents. And as we debate them, we owe it to the voters to keep our campaigns on the high road.

“I have in the past participated in negative campaigning and I regret it deeply. I let my supporters down and I apologize, for we must stress the positive ideas for which we are fighting and we must believe that America’s best days are before us and that those of us who earn the privilege to serve must give the very best that is within us,” he said.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) called on the president to take steps to ease the pain that the new welfare reform law is going to cause to the nation’s urban poor.

“My mother needed the help of government; she was assisted by welfare,” recalled Waters. “My mother was able to feed and house her children because of the compassion of her government. . . . Government invested in me through welfare and I stand before you as a United States congresswoman today.”

New Initiatives

Earlier in the day, Clinton--keeping his promise to unveil a new policy proposal every day during the convention--presented reporters traveling on his train with a plan to spend $1.9 billion over four years on the environment. The total cost of his convention-week initiatives has been estimated at $8.5 billion.

Chief among the new initiatives that Clinton proposed for the environment was a $1.3-billion program to accelerate cleanup of the nation’s 1,387 polluted “Superfund” sites so that two-thirds would be restored to acceptable purity by the year 2000.

“We have delayed it long enough,” Clinton said. His other initiatives would:

* Speed restoration of the polluted and unused industrial tracts called “brown fields” by spending $300 million in grants to find such sites and develop plans to improve them.

* Set new “environmental crimes” penalties that would enable prosecutors to punish polluters for planning to pollute and give them the authority to freeze the assets of suspected polluters during litigation and apply the value of those assets to cleanup costs.

* Expand, at the cost of $196 million over four years, the information available to communities about pollutants in their area. The goal would be to develop meaningful statistics and make them available through such sources as the Internet.

* Increase by $76 million the amount of federal money spent on grants to improve water quality.

Democrats judged Clinton’s train trip to the convention as a roaring success. “The excitement was palpable,” declared Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who joined the president at the last of 16 rallies along the route, which began Sunday in Huntington, W. Va.

The president continued to draw big crowds during the final leg of the trip through Michigan and Indiana, including a throng of more than 20,000 at Battle Creek Depot, Mich., that waited until nearly 11:30 p.m. Tuesday to hear Clinton speak under a towering poplar tree.

But there was one mishap.

A 20-foot-tall portable speaker stand fell into a crowd waiting to see Clinton in Michigan City. At least 13 people were hurt.

The victims, two of whom were bleeding profusely, wore neck braces as they were carried out on stretchers.

Costs of Train Trip

The cost of the 500-mile train trip may come in “way in excess” of $750,000, said White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry. Of that, $113,000 will be paid by the campaign. News organizations, who sent 248 people on parts of the journey, will put up an estimated $250,000 of the total.

Officials defended the share picked up by taxpayers, saying that the big tab reflected the ordinary high security costs of presidential travel in a dangerous age. The cost of presidential travel are “substantial,” said McCurry, adding: “That’s an unfortunate fact of life in our country but that’s been true of this president, the last president and most presidents.”

The bill for the 13-car, three-locomotive train was negotiated as a cost-plus contract with Amtrak, the passenger train line. The campaign’s share was calculated by figuring out how many people would be working for the campaign and how many would be carrying out functions ordinarily handled by the White House.

Also subtracted from the campaign’s share was the cost of security, high-tech communications that keep the president in touch with national security officials, the cost of his special medical staff and other customary parts of his travel expenses.