Clinton Advisor Gone, but His Strategy Lives

Bereft of his closest political advisor but with his reelection strategy firmly fixed, President Clinton continued to roll out his fall campaign Saturday on a colorful bus trip through the Mississippi River lowlands.

The sudden resignation of strategist Dick Morris, amid reports that he carried on an affair with a prostitute, removed a figure who had helped stabilize and revive the president’s political fortunes in the rocky months after the Democrats’ devastating defeats in the 1994 midterm elections.

But although Morris is gone, his game plan for the president’s fall campaign lives on in Clinton’s family-oriented themes and his persistently upbeat and forward-looking language--both of which have been on display as Clinton’s 14-bus caravan rolled through Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee on Friday and Saturday.

At stop after stop, from large late-night rallies to brief roadside appearances, Clinton pressed the themes he struck in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago last week.

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His talks are built around the metaphor of bridges to the future; he punctuates his speeches by asking the audience to join in the building of these spans.

“This is an election about whether we’re going to build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past,” Clinton said Saturday in Fulton, Ky., a town on the Tennessee line with a downtown composed of a rusty grain elevator and a main street with a number of shuttered shops. “Will you help me build a bridge to the 21st century?”

And in his weekly radio address, Clinton said the nation must look forward as it travels “on the right track to the 21st century. “This will be the age of great possibility for our people. This coming century can be the greatest moment in American history. We need to build a bridge to it.”

As he traveled through towns and tobacco fields, past cemeteries, strip malls, fast-food joints and barbecue shacks, Clinton returned again and again to the themes and programs he spelled out in Chicago--including a catalog of small-government actions designed to improve the daily lives of families: tax incentives for education and training, the preservation of middle-class entitlements like Medicare, aids to home ownership and retirement security.

Accompanied by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea, as well as Vice President Al Gore and Tipper Gore, Clinton identified his opponent not as Bob Dole but as the backward-looking ideas he said the GOP presidential candidate espouses.

He refrained from attacking Dole directly but linked him to what he called regressive tax and social policies designed to benefit those who already enjoy prosperity.

However, two villains of the Democratic convention were missing during the Clinton caravan: The president chose not to go after cigarette makers in this tobacco-growing area, nor did he demonize the gun lobby in a region filled with hunting enthusiasts.

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But he is all but certain to return to a full attack as he carries his campaign to the Midwest, Florida and California over the next 10 days. After completing the bus tour in Memphis, Tenn., Clinton was to fly to his home state of Arkansas on Saturday night. He is scheduled to travel to Wisconsin on Labor Day and return to Washington on Monday night.

During the upcoming swing, Clinton will continue to court moderate suburban voters, particularly women, concerned about their parents’ health care, their children’s welfare and their home mortgages.

These are the voters Morris identified as the treasure trove of the 1996 campaign, and it is their concerns that he pushed Clinton to address over the past 18 months with a series of small-bore initiatives, from school uniforms to longer hospital stays for childbearing.

And Morris’ ideas remain implanted in the heart of the candidate and the campaign.

“The framework of this campaign was set long ago,” said White House political director Doug Sosnik.

Sosnik is among the members of Clinton’s political team who are expected to gain additional stature with Morris’ exit.

Also stepping up to more prominent roles will be pollster Mark Penn and media advisor Robert Squier, both of whom were brought in by Morris.

Squier said his role until now has chiefly been in the creative end of making advertisements, but that he would now play a part in more tactical media decisions, such as what spots to run in what areas and when to run them.

Squier added that his partner, Bill Knapp, who has had only a peripheral role in the Clinton campaign, would become more active.

Penn is expected to increase his portfolio from polling to broader voter-targeting and media-buying decisions.

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White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said it was unlikely that Morris would be replaced by a single dominant figure. He said no political consultant enjoyed Clinton’s faith as much as Morris--before his resignation.

McCurry also said there is a need to adjust the fall strategy at this point. He said presidential advisor George Stephanopoulos and Deputy Chief of Staff Harold M. Ickes, already very influential, would become even more central in day-to-day political decision-making.

Clinton, in a Friday night interview with MTV, said that while Morris will play no official or unofficial role in the campaign, he would probably continue to talk occasionally with his former consultant.

“I’m going to keep the team I’ve got, and I’m going to keep the decision-making process in place,” Clinton said. “And I think we’ll do very well.”

In a Time magazine interview released Saturday, Morris’ wife, Eileen McGann, said she has accepted his apology and wants to help him get through the crisis.

“This is a 20-year relationship. People have painful times in relationships, and this is one of them,” she said. “I said, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ My advice was that we just had to get past it.”

Neither McGann, 37, nor her 48-year-old husband commented on whether the allegations of a yearlong relationship with a call girl were true.

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In other developments, Dole, after accusing Clinton of sending kids a “no big deal” message on drug use, worked in Washington to complete his plan to use the military and National Guard in an all-out assault on illegal drugs. He is expected to unveil the plan today before the National Guard Assn.

In the Republican response to Clinton’s radio address, Dole scoffed at the president’s mention of drugs to the Democratic convention, when he lamented that drugs nearly killed his brother and added, “I hate them.”

“One day of rhetoric in August of 1996 does not make up for . . . actions taken during the past four years,” said Dole. “Unfortunately, from its very first days in office, the Clinton administration, through neglect and ineptitude, has sent a very different message--a message that drugs are no big deal.”

In Phoenix, Dole’s running mate, Jack Kemp, gave the hard sell to the GOP ticket’s economic plan, which promises a 15% cut in income tax rates.

During an afternoon event with Republican supporters, styled as a round-table discussion, Kemp gave Clinton an unexpected endorsement on the North American Free Trade Agreement, with some caveats.

“I personally believe Bill Clinton did the right thing in signing NAFTA,” Kemp said. “But . . . they have put up so many barriers [to investment] in Washington, D.C., that there are more incentives sometimes to invest in foreign countries. And a new tax system would make it more favorable to invest in the United States of America.”

Times staff writer Maria L. La Ganga in Phoenix and Times wires services contributed to this story.